Spotlight on RDR: the unintended consequences

Some of us who have been accused of being "naysayers" in the past when in fact we may have been positive about the RDR's stated aims, have been saying this for YEARS!

The issue with RDR remains the FSA's intransigence on the timeline and thaT ALONE.

I should finish my level 4 in mid July this year and have been adviser charging (with improvements still to make) already, so the issue foe me is not whetehr I am on board forJan 2013, it is the FSA who have not got their act together.

Picking up on the comments above made at 5.43 - talking about client data held on a platform. We have just changed back office system and the same access issues applies with back office systems as with platforms.

We have just had to agree a contract with our OLD back office system to be able to access "read only" historical data in order to meet the demnds of the FSA. I can see there is some cost to them, especially as it was an asp version (i.e. held on their servers and not ours), BUT this will be a significant cost for the next 6 years and with the F-pack ignoring the longstop, dare we risk ditching this cost even at the 15 year point!

The info on the old back office system is all duplicated on our own servers (as that is where it will have come in the first place as post, fact finds, phoen calls etc), but is not on a database on our PC, just as named documents, which can be searched by title (assuming our spelling was spot on!) so is not as easily accessed. The archive and back up discs provided by the back office system cannot be reloaded by us, they have to be by the back office firm as they own the program, so now we have no licence for ongoing software OTHER than the read only copy, we have an extra cost we never expected, which nearly put us off changing back office system.

This is a cost that is overlooked when purchasing a back office system and much like a "director purchase agreement", the lack of the discussion taking place at the beginning of the contract, leaves problems and costs at the end.

Phil - really interesting comment on your back office system and helpful to all advisers who perhaps had overlooked the risk of losing historic records of their clients investments.

The frightening thing is realising we'd been so religiously destroying back up tapes and CDs and ensuring hard drives were wiped on obsolete PCs and laptops, we'd failed to realise how difficult it could be to access the data we were keeping!

The FSA did make a similar argument when I was explaining to them that we record client meetings as MP3 sound files when I explained that just as stolen tablets are/were teh durable medium of choice in the ancient world (and wax tablets, not so durable for the Roman Army), that paper is only so durable (we all know what happens to old faxes now) and that electronic data is probably more secure especially once ona a CD or tape in a fireproof safe (as we have), but the problem comes with reading it, just as with old cylinder recordings. It is the cost of data access which is the problem with older technology and back ups, not the durability.