The APDSI Blog

Debt counselling takes centre stage

Tuesday 22nd November 2011
Does being a financial intermediary now mean you have to be a debt counsellor? The seemingly endless changes taking place on the regulatory landscape can be very demanding on broker businesses without a compliance department. For brokers, trying to operate in a tough market and with a fast-changing regulatory and economic landscape, it can be difficult to know how exactly to advise a client, especially if they can’t place them for a mortgage, re-mortgage or a secured loan. Where do they go from there? Considering Freedom Finance’s recent news that almost 48 per cent of borrowers who applied for personal loan applications in 2011 cited debt consolidation as the reason behind it, it seems inevitable that financial intermediaries will need to be able to offer debt counselling, as defined by the OFT licensing regime. As more and more intermediaries come across clients in financial hardship with high levels of unsecured debts – which may have arisen from a major change in circumstance – being able to help clients with borrowing and non-borrowing debt relief strategies is of paramount importance. Loss of income remains a primary cause of debt problems and often the first symptom that a financial intermediary is aware of is when...
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Compliance, clarity and clarification

Tuesday 25th October 2011
  Alisdair Warwood, Secretary General of the Association of Professional Debt Solutions Intermediaries gives us his personal views on the debt management sector and key issues intermediaries may face within the industry... The OFT website has recently been updated to promote a job vacancy for an Internet Investigator. One of the specific areas of on-line activity that Internet Investigators may be asked to tackle is websites which contain false, misleading or deceptive information likely to lead to considerable consumer detriment.   It is very clear from the recent OFT consultation document "Misleading or Otherwise Undesirable Names" (OFT1378) that small businesses, notably financial intermediaries, may need to review their existing licences to ensure that they have their websites on their licence and that they don't transgress some of the new guidelines on what is acceptable as a trading style, for example their website domain name.   Some of the clarification in the OFT document is obvious with regard to not pretending to be a business substantially larger than it really is - the advertising on the side  of Dell Boy's three wheel van in Only Fools and Horses – Trotter’s Independent Trading – New York – Paris - Peckham would be a good example of this. The OFT has also...
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