In 2017, consumer watchdog Which? discovered that nearly two-thirds of advisers listed at the time on Unbiased may have been misleading the public with false claims about their credentials.
In the same year, the CISI threatened to take advisers to court if they falsely used the certified financial planner designation.
Karen Barrett, chief executive and founder of Unbiased, said: "We are not aware of any regulated financial advisers misrepresenting their CISI qualifications, or any qualifications, on our platform or indeed misrepresenting themselves more widely in their dealings with the public, but if this is the case I would urge CISI to act quickly and take appropriate action given the risk of misrepresentation to the public and the integrity of the CISI brand.
"In our experience of dealing with advisers over the last decade, it is extremely rare that an adviser will knowingly claim to be something they are not and is most likely to be where an individual has moved on and not updated the branch details.”
She added the recent move from the FCA to remove individual data from its data feed did not help the situation in monitoring this, adding: “We have recently increased our customer services team resource so we can manually spot check individual data on our platform to ensure our data standards are maintained."
rachel.mortimer@ft.com
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