Our influence

Much of our work takes place behind closed doors, yet our efforts often benefit not only member firms but the wider sector.  Recent success stories from the last 24 months include:

• Consumer Duty – When it comes to regulation, words matter. The omission of a crucial word in a Consumer Duty cross-cutting rule could have had significant implications for mortgage intermediary firms had it not been for AMI’s intervention. At Consumer Duty consultation stage, we highlighted to the FCA the word ‘causing’ was absent from the, at the time, draft rule ‘avoid foreseeable harm’. With the word ‘causing’ omitted, the rule did not clearly articulate to firms and consumers that a firm does not have a responsibility to prevent all harms and risked creating unreasonable expectations. If left unchecked it could have created ambiguity over whether accountability rests with the firm creating the harm, or those involved in manufacture or distribution could have been linked vicariously. This may have resulted in misrepresentation by FOS and prohibitively more expensive Professional Indemnity Insurance (PII) premiums.
• Merging of fees – AMI consistently lobbied over a number of years for mortgage intermediary firms to be exempt from paying FCA fees under both the ‘A’ and ‘consumer credit’ blocks, where they derive no income from consumer credit activities. Last year the FCA confirmed it will phase the merging of CC2 (consumer credit) minimum fees into fee-block A.0 so that firms in the A and CC fee-blocks all pay a single minimum fee in A.0, protecting the majority of mortgage intermediary firms from paying duplicate fees.
• Recovery of project costs – we strongly opposed the FCA’s proposal to require all FCA fee payer firms to contribute to the FCA’s costs of bringing funeral plan providers into regulation. The FCA agreed with our argument and only funeral plan providers contributed to these costs. This has created, in our view, an important precedent for when the likes of sectors such as Buy Now Pay Later are brought under regulation.
• REP-CRIM and FIN074 FCA regulatory returns – many mortgage intermediary firms discovered the regulatory return ‘REP-CRIM’ in their regulatory schedule for the first time. Linked to this, some firms also received a new regulatory return called ‘FIN074’ which asked for turnover information to calculate if an Economic Crime Levy was payable. We worked closely with member firms and the FCA to unpick what was triggering these returns, as we believed most mortgage intermediary firms to be outside of scope. As a result of our work, a significant number of mortgage intermediary firms were identified as incorrectly receiving the returns and subsequently had them removed from their RegData schedule. If AMI had not intervened, some firms would have been required to pay an Economic Crime Levy of between £10,000-£36,000.