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TODAY'S OTHER NEWS

Compliance at the coal face

The principal issue we come up against as we go around the UK visiting all our brokers is a lack of a coherent, structured Training & Education programme.

Of course, this is mainly a problem for the smallest broker firms, the small traders and the ones who wouldn’t recognise the phrase “down time” if they read it in a Shakespeare sonnet.

Part of the reason we offer a set of five modules in our own Training & Education programme is that they answer the two questions; “What kind of training should I be taking? And where can I find it?”

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We’re trying to make it much easier for our Patrons to train our members, either by inviting a suitable sample to an event, or by adding to our CPD programme informative documents that leave a broker educated in a specific field or product. It all counts towards, ultimately, giving the client a better and fuller service.

And in turn, this means that we’re expecting to find our visits easier and more efficient as 2017 goes on, because we’re already putting in place the things we think would have benefited the brokers who we’ve already seen.

On the other side of that coin, the ones who put their hands up and yelled “Me first! See me first!” are precisely the ones who you’d expect to have done their homework and brought an apple for teacher, so perhaps the second half of 2017 will introduce us to some brokers who need a little more help to attain top levels of compliance.

A disaster recovery plan is essential, but it’s no good if it exists as a paper document in a drawer in a filing cabinet in an office that’s on fire. The NACFB itself lost a number of pull-up show banners to a basement flood six months ago and we were lucky not to lose any important files at the same time – had the water levels risen another ten inches, we would have started to lose things that were irreplaceable.

You might say the answer to these problems is the paperless office, but even that is no kind of silver bullet if your important document is on a laptop that gets left on the 11:32 Edinburgh train, or on a corrupted hard drive, or in a cloud storage service accessible only by a staff member who left three weeks ago.

‘Paperlessness’, if that’s even a word, is just a step in the right direction towards a best-practice solution. It’s certainly not the case that “paperlessness means compliance”. But on those occasions when we walk into a working office that resembles a hurricane in a printing press, we can usually be sure that other “sub-optimal” working practices are buried not so far below the surface.

When we do come across a member with a calendar of training plans and a secure set of back-up copies of everything that matters, then that’s the first two hurdles cleared, and these things are nominally quite easy to achieve.

*Rob Lankey is the interim CEO of the NACFB

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