“I personally believe consumer duty will be really positive for customer outcomes. There has been a short term potential downside that a lot of people have been more worried about smaller clients because they feel like the regulatory burden is greater.
"We will get past that bump, and people will recognise that when you take into account the advice guidance boundary work as well, you can serve those clients brilliantly.
“Some in the industry are saying people will retreat from small clients altogether. I don't believe that's true. People will look at roles like ours and others out there and say, 'yes, I need to think about serving them differently, but I shouldn't retreat from that market'.”
Innovation
Handcock also believed the amount of startups and “innovative thinking” now seen in the sector will help to begin narrowing the gap.
She said: “For anyone who's running a business day to day, it is incredibly hard to lift yourself away from your clients and say 'I'm going to think about the world differently today'.
“What you need is a partner to come along and say, 'I've thought about the world differently, I have proved it can work and I can help you'.
“That is what business owners need, because no one can expect a business owner to come up with all the answers themselves. That wave of innovation and the amount of investment into wealth management that I saw in retail banking 10 years ago, I see it in wealth management now, not to quite the same degree, but it's coming.”
Handcock believed it would take everyone in the industry acting differently to begin seeing real change.
“There is no way one firm serving small clients will solve this problem, but if everyone starts to adopt those methodologies, I'm a big believer that the methodology should be open source.
“We're writing ours down and saying, If anyone wants to use our methodology, use it, because that's the only way you solve a 92 per cent gap in availability of the service,” she added.
Handcock pointed out that with the advice guidance boundary review, the industry needed to be cautious and not go back to non personalised routes to investment.
She said: “There are some ways in which you could interpret the current guidance that the regulator has produced that says, a pathway would be applicable to big cohorts of people. And there might be some cases where that's sensible. Pension drawdown may be one of those actually, where you've got to think about it in terms of cohorts of customers rather than individual plans.
“There are other places where we have got to be quite cautious of sending sales messages to people with deposits and saying you should invest. This will confuse people for a start, and also won't actually give people confidence. No one has the confidence to invest unless they understand how their whole financial life fits together.
