Summer annual

Amongst the pile of paperwork to emerge from 25,The North Colonnade in June was a hefty tome, which, though it does not call for response, repays study and perhaps discussion.The FSA Annual Report 2003/04, yearbook and benchmark of the regulator’s performance, is a useful, albeit partisan summary of just how much has been achieved in the last 12 months (to 31 March 2004), all the way from final transparency rules for Alternative Trading Systems to the ongoing enquiries into alleged collusion amongst market participants in the split capital investment trust industry. On the subject of enforcement, the FSA aims to speed up the process, says John Tiner, and will shortly report in full on its “end to end review”. Scanning the pages yields other useful pointers and statistics: for example, as part of its thematic work on financial crime, the FSA looked at claimant fraud against insurers in a bid to derive best practice but was forced to conclude that the industry approach is “under-developed”. It noted a lack of leadership and is now trying to decide what to do next. More positively, the comparative tables for investment products on the website have proved a hit, literally, with nearly 30,000 visitors a month. Greater access to meaningful data is a start in the campaign to enhance the financial capability of ordinary consumers but the FSA continues to bemoan firms’ attitudes to fair treatment: it says that “all to often” they “appear to be trying…to meet the letter of the rules, while failing to embrace the spirit.”