More contact and help from the FSA
We are increasing the level of personal, direct contact with small firms as we have evidence that this is the best way to encourage improvements amongst the vast majority of firms. At the same time, we will be able to identify, more quickly, the small minority of firms who are not treating their customers fairly.
This additional contact is over and above the contact you have with us through ongoing supervision and thematic work.
Starting next year, we will be carrying out a rolling programme of assessments with the management of small firms, to assess the quality of that management and to test the progress made on TCF. We will follow up the assessments with full on-site visits to either substantiate the information given to us or to investigate any firms who raised concerns during the assessment.
This is a continuing programme. We hope to see real progress over the next two years, although we won't have completed all the assessments during this timeframe. We need to measure progress both before and after the TCF deadline of December 2008, and of course the requirement of embedding TCF doesn’t end with the deadline.