Taking TCF Seriously
Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) should have been a priority of every financial services firm for the last two years but recently the regulator reinforced the importance of this initiative.
In July, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) issued a statement urging firms that are already implementing TCF to maintain the momentum so that the initiative delivers real benefits to consumers.1
And it warned those that aren't making satisfactory progress with TCF, only have until March next year to show they are taking the initiative seriously.
Clive Briault, Managing Director Retail Markets at the FSA said: "We acknowledge that most firms are making good progress on implementing Treating Customers Fairly and we encourage their senior management to keep the momentum going."
What have we done?
Here at Paymentshield we have 4 high level principles of business, relating to TCF:
- To demonstrate that we are treating customers fairly by considering their needs when designing and delivering products and services
- To actively seek feedback from you and our policyholders to obtain views on the way they are treated and encourage suggestions on how we can improve our products and services
- To ensure when contacting customers directly, or producing material to support intermediary sales we will clearly explain the features, costs, benefits and risks of our products
- To ensure our employees will be trained and assessed to manage customers' needs and progress will be monitored through a range of key performance indicators. If problems do arise we will make it clear what procedures the customers should follow and deal with their concerns promptly and sympathetically
What does this mean to you?
We have rolled out a number of initiatives to support these principles including customer forums, intermediary research on products and services and questionnaires to policyholders about the quality of our service. In addition we have introduced internal processes to ensure TCF is incorporated throughout our literature.
Internally we have also introduced a process to assist employees with learning and development including measurement of Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). We'll keep you up-to-date with developments on TCF but this is a serious consideration for all firms regardless of size. A good source of information on the initiative is the regulator's site. It has pages specifically dedicated to TCF that can be accessed at http://www.fsa.gov.uk/Pages/Doing/Regulated/tcf/index.shtml And to help firms understand how to implement TCF, the FSA has published examples of good and poor practice on its site.
- CC191