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Your Shout: Letters to the editor

Financial Adviser Letters

Financial Adviser Letters

I decided to wait on the line as the indicated waiting time was much shorter than my previous calls to CII during technical glitches in July and August. 

However, after listening to the music (which is now stuck in my head) and the constant machine-generated apologies for keeping me waiting, I realised it was pretty much a waste of my life, so I hung up.

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The process of booking a re-sit seems to be very straightforward: CII issues a voucher online to all candidates, then candidates use the voucher to book the re-sit via CII’s online booking system. Done.

I really don’t know what they have to discuss with me via a phone call. 

I guess in the next few days I will have to carry my mobile phone everywhere I go and pick up their call by interrupting whatever I will be doing at that moment. Sounds exciting!

Nevertheless, I do hope that my re-sit can be booked and confirmed soon. I am more keen than ever to work hard on my R06 exam not only to pass it but also to end my CII saga.

Name and address supplied

 

Complaints debacle

Following your article ‘MPs face calls to suspend “scandalous” FCA consultation’ (Sep 9). 

On June 2 2020 Charles Randell, chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority, made the following statement in a letter to the chairman of the Treasury Committee, saying: “I would like to start by confirming that we accept the [Complaints] Commissioner’s criticism raised in the above case and the wider comments he has made in his response to you around the levels of service and quality of complaints handling. 

“While the majority of complainants do receive timely and adequate responses to their complaints, it is unacceptable that some complainants have experienced significant delays in the handling of their complaints or received inadequate responses.

“We have acknowledged that significant and prompt improvement is necessary to address this, and ensure this situation does not recur.”

Yet to read the consultation document on the complaints scheme issued a month later you would have no sense of a problem whatsoever.  

If the chairman of a listed company had made such a statement and then issued a prospectus a month later that ignored it in such a way, there would be serious comment and possibly a Stock Exchange investigation. 

Yet this is the other world of the FCA.  

The members of the Treasury Committee have not helped with these issues.  

When they ‘interviewed’ the prospective head of the FCA, Nikhil Rathi, in July for his confirmation hearing not a single question on complaints was raised.