Brokers, councils, people, companies – all are expected to do due diligence on firms they use. To assess the finanical strength of a bank, an insurer, an investment fund, looking up what the rating agencies are saying commonly forms part of the strategy. This is fundamentally flawed though. Who rates the rating agencies and who pays them? Generally the people they are rating! Further, how regularly do they check? My worst experience was the demise of Independent Insurance. Their rating looked fine and whatever qualms or gut feelings we brokers had about them, the ratings looked good and who were we to contradict? This led to brokers placing busienss against their better judgement in order to save business from being lost. Hindsight would have been a wonderful thing. Anyway, my point is, they were not downgraded until very shortly before they went bust! So what use is that? Due diligence on your bankers doesn’t sound like such a silly idea now does it? Where do you start though? Making sure the bank is UK based and registered with our FSA, check with the rating agencies, is about all you can do! Frankly you’d be better off reading the Sun – maybe the FT then.

Being asked to fill in and post off lengthy client satisfaction surveys can be a pain and intrusive. If they land at the wrong moment they certaily end up in the bin. It’s a shame though as I believe that involving clients in your process is important and as a client, if things are not perfect or if they are even, it is worth making your voice heard. With the FSA requiring financial services firms to prove that they are treating customer fairly, this got me thinking. First of all about using a direct mailing firm to sort out a campaign and then about harnessing the cheap and easy medium of e mail to do this, after 12 months of ‘thinking’ about it along with my esteemed friends at In House Marketing, Easy TCF was born! www.easytcf.co.uk it’s free to trial, it’s for general brokers, finanical advisers and mortgage advisers. Fedback would of course be welcomed