FCA web site and the MMR

I have just been looking around the FCA web site just to get a feel for it as it were.

It is good to know that the links for GABRIEL and ONA at the present time take you back to the old FSA pages for entry so there should hopefully be no issues for anyone with RMARs to do in the next 30 days - probably the vast majority of small firms.

I think we have to consider it early days for the FCA site however. Some pages look a little odd, if not unhelpful. For example I had a look at the page under Firms with specific reference to Home Finance (it's under the Show More + tab) . The actual URL is

 http://www.fca.org.uk/firms/firm-types/mortgage-brokers-and-home-finance-lenders

You can see from this that at the present time it's not very helpful and on a preliminary search I couldn't find anything like the small firms guides that the FSA had. Hopefully these will not disappear as they were very useful!

What I did find however, was a Planning Tool for small firms to prepare for MMR. It was published according to the site back on 20/02/2013. Because it is loaded in a limited area on the page (Iframe or Div - I didn't look)  it is quite difficult to read the whole document and it is better if you download the thing to look at it properly.  The URL is below if you want to have  a look at it on the FCA site

http://www.fca.org.uk/your-fca/documents/fsa-mmr-planning-tool

The 'old'  FSA site also holds a copy that is easier to read at :

http://www.fsa.gov.uk/static/pubs/other/mmr_planning_tool.pdf

It looks to be  the same document.

This is presumably the document that will form the basis of the questionnaire that will be  carried out by all firms some time this coming Quarter by the FCA.

The plan is  not over complex but I will be  doing some work on this over the next week or so and will be  publishing an update of it with suggested actions to my registered clients.

If you are not a registered client ( i.e. you don't pay me for my compliance services) then this might be  a good time to think about it...