33% see senior management obstacle to TCF

A third of the approximately 400 delegates to the FSA’s recent Treating Customers Fairly conference said that senior management buy-in was the biggest barrier to implementing TCF in their firm. Another 23% believed that the main problem lay with the quality of staff; 11% said that cost was the major issue and 10% blamed regulation. Asked how advanced their organisation was with its TCF work, the majority (44%) of respondents said they were at the implementation stage while 22% claimed that the concept was now fully embedded. Strategy and planning was still being undertaken by 26% and 8% remained at the awareness stage. Speaking at the event, Clive Briault, Managing Director, Retail Markets, FSA, repeated a challenge from July for “all firms to reach the ‘implementing’ phase in a substantial part of their business by the end of March 2007.”