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So the woes of Park Row have culminated in an almighty fine and a severe rap on the knuckles from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

It has ordered the beleaguered intermediary firm to pay out between £5m and £7.8m in compensation over failings in providing evidence of the suitability of products sold and advice given by its staff.

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When I first accepted a job as a financial journalist in September 2006, I wondered what on earth I had signed up for.

After spending the first eight hours as a features writer at Financial Adviser struggling to write a product review on a two-year fixed rate mortgage – trying to decipher LTV, ERC, APR, M-day and FSA, among other things – I thought to myself there had to be more to the financial services industry than this.

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The removal of Northern Rock’s guarantee is welcome as a significant step towards returning the cash savings market to a level playing field.

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Even for the most un-eco-conscious, making ethical lifestyle choices has become ingrained in our everyday routine. But how far does this extend to the investments we make?

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The Financial Services Skills Council (FSSC) last week announced that it was seeking greater engagement with the financial services companies to shape professional qualifications.

The FSSC called on employers to have a greater say on in vocational reform with the launch of a new website, and could be advisers’ greatest opportunity to have an influence over qualifications.
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A combination of factors make the prospects for venture capital trust (VCT) fundraising to be much better this year.

Firstly the economy, as the UK starts to slowly emerge from the recession those companies that have survived are in a stronger position to grow their business and, with lack of bank funding in the SME sector, the opportunities for VCTs to find attractive growth deals has improved.

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The only section of the City regulator’s mammoth workforce that is giving value for money is the enforcement division.
But, increasingly it is beginning to look as if Margaret Cole and her team are on an evangelising mission to ‘clean up’ the waste in the mortgage advice sector.
And, like all evangelising missions, it now appears as if natural rights are being thrown out the window and the good, bad and basically incompetent are being swept along in this tsunami of moralising regulation.
Recently, a number of people have been banned for gross incompetence, lack of integrity and what can only be called making basic, but costly, mistakes.
In any regulatory climate and by any measure, all these offences are not the same.
It is not comparing like with like: an adviser who makes a fraudulent mortgage application is not the same as someone who keeps bad records, just as a person lacking in integrity cannot be allowed to continue in the sector.
But ‘integrity’ must be given a strict regulatory definition and not be thrown about like falling leaves in the autumn.
Equally, to threaten incompetence, however it is measured, as an offence worthy of a life ban is perverse.
An incompetent adviser can be trained and a conditional ban would be an appropriate punishment for such an offence.
We also need to drill down more closely how this over-exuberance can lead to denying people their human rights.
If, for example, an appointed representative makes bogus mortgage submissions to a directly authorised adviser and they are allowed through, of course the adviser should be punished.
But to suggest he should be barred for life from the industry is, in the real world, disproportionate.
Of course, the adviser should have checked the application thoroughly, but incompetence is not a crime.
Even if he had been sentenced to imprisonment for the criminal offence of fraud the term would hardly go beyond six months.
Sorting out the wheat from the chaff is one thing, denying people their livelihood because of incompetence is another.
Then there is the little matter of the shared backgrounds of a large number of the victims of this moral campaign.
I am sure that it is mere coincidence that these people are picked on, even if they are wrongdoers, but how they come to the attention of the authorities is the interesting question.
Good enforcement is necessary in a sector notorious for its greed, but objectivity and fairness should be the watchwords.

Question: Why do government financiers put up with the UK’s outdated state rituals?
Answer: So they can put another economic crisis on expenses.
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The easiest way to acquire a small fortune is to begin with a large one, goes the old joke, but those who want to hang on to their wealth usually need professional help to do so. With the advent of the mass affluent has come a new breed of investment manager or, more recently, firms that term themselves wealth managers, many of which offer a range of inhouse discretionary investment funds.
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The latest annual inflation figures of 3.7 per cent for the retail prices index (RPI) and 3.5 per cent for the consumer prices index (CPI) mean that both basic and higher rate taxpayers face a near impossible struggle to get a real rate of return on taxable savings accounts.

The stark reality is that there are now no taxable instant access or notice accounts that will give a real rate of return to even a basic rate taxpayer let alone a higher rate taxpayer.

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Exchequer secretary to the Treasury, Sarah McCarthy-Fry gave a speech to the Remittances & Financial Inclusion Conference, last week.

During the course of the 1,500 word speech the minister talked of “the contribution that financial services can make to fairness, equality and social cohesion in the UK” and how migrants and those on lower incomes are affected by financial exclusion.

But did she mention the word “advice”? Not once.
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It’s the season for romance, but the more practical, investment savvy among us might be forgiven for not buying their loved one a traditional gift of gold.

Dale Winton’s TV appearances aren’t normally a barometer by which serious investment houses judge an asset class.

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You could be forgiven for thinking financial services is hardly a hearts and flowers kind of industry.

However, if you saw my email inbox in the last few days you would realise that Valentine’s Day is on the mind of many providers.

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Just as Gordon Brown staggers on in his premiership, the financial services sector looks like it could face another blow.
He is saying that there may be a gobally co-ordinated tax, following president Obama’s move to attack the banks last month.
The idea seems to have been agreed in principle, it’s more a question of how it should be implemented.
Putting aside the politics of the move – the fact that Mr Brown seems to perform better on the world stage than at home, and the imposition in the UK of a tax on bonuses – the plan is to be welcomed and perhaps lends support to fiercer regulation of the financial sector.
Many may have thought that President Obama’s plan to get the banks to shed hedge fund and proprietary trading could have been, in part, a way of showing that he’s tough, after the Democrats lost the Massachussetts Senate seat. Now he seems to be getting worldwide support, and the drift away from regulation that seemed to be taking place is coming back. How much further the politicians will go, and how far-reaching these consequences may turn out to be factors under close scrutiny for some time to come.

It’s been nearly four years since Living Time launched its fixed-term annuities and broke new ground in the retirement income market.

As this market has grown rapidly, it is not surprising that other providers have taken an interest.

Now one of these has joined us.

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With the Celebrity Big Brother fad all but over, TV producers are struggling to find a source of cheap entertainment.

But forget I’m a Celebrity or X-Factor, the Endemols and Simon Cowells of this world could do no worse than looking to the Treasury select committee’s latest hearing titled Financial Institutions Too Big To Fail for the next big ratings hitter.

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There’s something rotten in asset management.

Maybe that turn of phrase doesn’t have the same ring to it as the famous Shakespearean attack on the state of Denmark, but it stinks nonetheless.
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The government’s proposed commitment to apprenticeships for young people, which brings with it a significant funding promise, has helped to bring the spotlight back on apprenticeships.

Last week was national Apprenticeship Week 2010, so now seems as good a time as any to talk about some of the benefits of the apprenticeship programme for financial services employers.
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The fallout of the credit crunch has created a potential flurry of new banks on the high street and the supermarket checkout.

Greed got the better for most banks who for many years took advantage of the massive cost income ratios available to them and now the new kids on the banking block are taking advantage.

It appears that the government is turning its back on the established part of the banking sector, which it courted for years, with Lord Myners of Truro, financial services secretary to the Treasury, courting a number of new kid banks to establish a high street presence.

The credit crunch and the multi-billion government bail out means that Northern Rock, the taxpayer owned bits of Bradford & Bingley and the forced sale of Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland businesses means that there are plenty of opportunities for the new kids.

It is believed that there has not been a new major high street bank in the UK for around 100 years and it seems there are plenty of new kids who want to take advantage of the massive profits available in the sector.

Virgin recently got its banking license buying little known Church House. Metro Bank is waiting for its licence from the FSA and Walton & Co, a bank launched by Sandy Chen, former analyst at Panmure Gordon, has been tapping investors for funds.

Non traditional financial services companies like Tesco, Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer have all been rumoured they may go into retail banking.

Liz Hartley, consultant for Datamonitor’s Financial Services team, said that the new banks will bring a more dynamic aspect to financial services.

She said that Tesco Bank will take a 1.5 per cent share of the current account market as soon as 2013.

While Metro Bank will win 0.5 per cent market share in the UK current account market by 2015.

Clearly the banking sector is set for more changes to come.

The only real interest this month in the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decision was whether the quantitative easing (QE) programme would be extended and whether there would be any comment from the MPC giving an indication about what next week’s quarterly Inflation Report will say.

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Politicians are pre-eminent exponents of Murphy’s Law; anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Together with central banks they represent the greatest threat to the global economic recovery.

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If the UK’s measly 0.1 per cent economic growth for the last quarter of 2009 led investment professionals to call the growth rate “anaemic”, then there are some serious iron supplements required.

While it is always pleasant to hear encouraging news after such prolonged agony, the caveat still stands that we are “only just” out of recession. “Creeping”, “limping” and “finally emerging” out of the period of decline have been common parlance, making the ‘recovery’ seem somewhat bittersweet.

But what did people expect? If GDP figures leapt out of their depths with any more verocity, people would be – quite rightly – suspicious.

Anaemic has two meanings – 1: suffering from anaemia; and 2: lacking spirit or vitality.

Our recent gains might well have been lacking in vitality, but at least we are now on the mend, rather than still in the intensive care unit.

But enough terrible patient analogies.

While fund managers have met the news with caution, warning that the unwinding of debt – at government, corporate and individual levels – must be addressed and calmed before any true recovery can take place, and quantitative easing programmes need to be fine-tuned (surely you can only print so much money before inflation gets ridiculously out of control?) in order to stabilise the UK’s sovereign debt?

Jupiter’s Edward Bonham Carter insists we have a long way to go before things move from sideways to upwards, while Ted Scott, F&C’s director of UK strategy warned recently the lack of a firm exit strategy could result in a currency crisis – creating something of a vicious circle.

Individual investors, meanwhile, according to TD Waterhouse, indicated a threefold increase in buys versus sells off the back of the hopeful news of the UK coming out of recession.

While interest rates in the west look set to remain low for the foreseeable future and the jury is out as to what will happen to inflation (or stagflation – in part or whole), all is not entirely lost.

Perhaps UK plc will start to have a bit of colour in her cheeks before too long.

You know things are getting bad when even your own kind turns on you.

Last week, HSBC chairman Stephen Green, without any sign of irony, hit out at “distorted” banker’s bonuses, joining the ever-growing and universally hysterical mob of pitchfork-wielding bank bashers.

Indeed.
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Another month and yet more evidence that demand for financial advice is soaring, but how will this be served by an industry likely to face an increasing regulatory burden and a shortage of advisers?

One way that we could could feel the gap is by diverting some of the cash generated by the Government’s tax on bankers’ bonuses into training schemes and support for the financial advice industry.

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