Treating Customers Fairly

The Cobalt Group proudly adheres to ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ (or ‘TCF’), a principle-based regulation created by the Financial Services Authority.

The basic thrust of TCF — which is an enforceable principle rather than a law — is that all financial services firms must have procedures in place to ensure they can treat ALL of their customers fairly in ALL of their dealings, both current and future.

The Cobalt Group embraced TCF in its infancy and has made great strides to embed TCF into its day-to-day activities — not just as a principle but as an evolving culture.
 
Certain aspects of TCF are more obvious, e.g. ensuring all documentation is clear, simple and in plain English, and that any advertising clearly displays all charges; providing a transparent and fair fee-charging structure; and making sure that all advisers have the appropriate qualifications and can competently perform their roles.

The less obvious areas of how TCF is being adopted by The Cobalt Group are:

1. Creating a remuneration structure that rewards consultants and administrators for quality of advice and service, not just volume. This is a goal we are currently working towards.
2. Putting a structure in place that ensures we actively learn from complaints and take all necessary measures to reduce the likelihood of the same complaints happening again.
3. Asking ALL clients to complete a client satisfaction questionnaire; we have also taken this one step further by sending a similar questionnaire to all clients who engage us but then do not progress to offer.
4. Providing a robust recruitment policy that involves Human Resources Management and Compliance in tandem due to our unique structure.
5. Investing heavily in management information systems that provide hard KPIs (key performance indicators) and the less obvious ‘soft’ KPIs. The system we have implemented provides data that enables supervisors to easily assess their teams during monthly business reviews and uncovers high level KPIs for the partners to identify trends.
6. Finally, we have a steering group involving staff from each division of The Cobalt Group, which meets bi-annually to advise partners on the impact of the latest TCF initiatives and what measures the senior management team should take to implement and accommodate them.