Treating customers fairly
Related information
Industry training workshops
TCF for relationship managed firms
TCF: understanding the FSA's expectations
How smaller firms can work towards meeting the principle of TCF
See also
FSA paper
Treating Customers Fairly – building on progress
Press release
FSA tells industry that Treating Customers Fairly must be 'business as usual'.
The aim of the FSA’s TCF project is to ensure that firms meet the requirements of principle 6 to “pay due regard to the interests of its customers and treat them fairly”.
The FSA has said that it expects firms – and their senior management – to consider the implications of TCF for their business and to take steps to tackle any shortfalls which they identified as a result.
Latest updates
Overview
In its latest paper 'Treating Customers Fairly – Building on Progress' (published in July 2005), the FSA set out feedback from its supervisory work looking at standards in different firms and identified a range of issues that firms of different kinds might find it helpful to consider as the review whether they comply with the principle of TCF.
Launching the publication, Oliver Page, Director Major Retail Groups Division said:.
"Putting customers' interests at the heart of their business structures should be 'business as usual' for firms. While we have seen encouraging signs of progress from the industry, there is still more to do before we can be satisfied that all firms are treating customers fairly. We have seen examples of firms that have not gone much further than an initial consideration of how Treating Customers Fairly works and, while we do not expect things to change overnight, we do expect senior management to take the lead and make practical changes to the way they do business in order to implement Treating Customers Fairly strategies."
Material on these pages
The TCF web pages provide:
- Access to speeches and other FSA publications on TCF;
- Reports on the FSA’s TCF related work. including:
- The results of supervisory work (“clusters”) undertaken with more than 80 firms in 2004/5 looking at the systems and controls they have in place in a number of specific areas of their businesses and the implications these have for how they go about treating their customers fairly. The results of six initial clusters are reported here.
- Supervisory work with a number of larger firms and a group of medium and smaller firms reviewing the work they have done on TCF to date.
- Case studies examining what treating customers fairly means in a particular context
- The results of our consumer research
What TCF implies will differ from firm to firm depending upon the activities carried out by the firm, how it is organised and structured. Firms will also need to consider the varying needs of the different types of consumer who their products and services are aimed at.
Before reading this material, please read the introductions to relevant sections as they contain important information explaining the status of the material.