the power hour
do you slip from authorisation to registration? We understand where we are as an industry, as a benchmark just registration is where we would like to get to because that will allow us to track people an awful lot better. We’d also like the double hit of costs as well. It’s not very often you’ll hear us say that. DG: I accept that and I think the other point is that the fact we haven’t brought in the individual approved persons regime is to make sure it doesn’t stop due diligence within firms itself. Due diligence doesn’t need to be carried out by us. There’s a lot firms can do to make sure they’re not taking on the wrong people.
unaffordable mortgage which is clearly a very bad grievance which we would be very concerned about.
what would you do If someone reported to you a bdm has saId not to place InformatIon on an applIcatIon as It wIll Impact the lIkelIhood of the borrower beIng approved? JHi: That’s a very serious matter certainly and that intelligence would be passed to the FSA supervisor of that lender for investigation and we’ll obviously expect the lender to act appropriately with that information following that up. Obviously there are all sorts of shades of grey with each case but we certainly expect lenders to take that very seriously and take appropriate action. DG: We had a number of brokers coming to us and saying they’ve been told that if they package an application a certain way they would get them through. We followed that and we checked it out with various industry contacts and frankly it was a case of there being so much smoke there must
be a fire. It’s a question of following up with individual lenders and then we’d put a shot across people’s bows by saying we were aware of the issue and that we were looking at it. If we find evidence of that then we will pull the trigger. NS: To be fair to lenders as well they’ve done lots of analysis. If lenders are transparent and open in their relationship with the broker and the broker is then the same back then you’re not going to get big frauds turning up. You’ve got to be there and listening to the FSA. To me the delay in the individual registration is a big miss. If the FSA takes nothing more from this session then go back and implement individual registration. DG: The point is not lost on us. We are well aware of how important the individual registrations for approved persons are. We’re continuing to prioritise our work as best we can. It’s something we’ll do as soon as we possibly can but I can’t give a time frame. RS: One of the complexities around this from our position in the industry is making sure that we’re clear about where the control functions of this sits. Who’s technically authorised and at what point
why does It take the fsa two to four years to ban brokers? TS: A lot of our cases do move faster than that and of course in a perfect world we’d like it to proceed faster than that sort of time frame but we are dealing with various people and we can’t proceed on mere accusations. We need firm evidence. Quite often it requires liaising with the police, liaising with the tax authorities to build a strong case and equally the subjects have a chance to defend themselves to ensure fairness.
I’ve heard tell that brokers are nervous about reportIng one another for suspected fraud. has the level of reportIng gone up sInce before the crunch? JHi: In terms of the “information from brokers” webpage which we would encourage brokers to use for exactly that purpose, we’ve had literally a handful of referrals since that was set up in 2005. So there are very few brokers reporting brokers. TS: We appreciate the complications and
Follow us on Twitter @mortgagechat 36 mortgage introducer JANUARY 2012
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