Fairer Finance, the consumer voice in financial services, has endorsed the STAR initiative. STAR aims to galvanise the industry in its goal of improving the outcomes for individuals who want to transfer their assets, such as pensions and investments. This will significantly improve the transfer performance of the industry.
Fairer Finance was founded in 2014 by consumer champion James Daley. The business is a social enterprise which uses its profits to pay for its campaigning work and to grow the business. Its mission is to create a financial services market which is fair for consumers as well as the companies that serve them. Fairer Finance represents the customer’s voice in financial services.
A growing community of firms have signed up to the STAR initiative, which officially launched in November 2018 and already has over 40 companies and organisations committed to shaping recognised, industry-wide standards to promote good practice in transfers. The first steering group and working groups have met with more scheduled.
The STAR remit is clearly defined and will:
- Define the processes required to complete a transfer
- Specify good practice targets for each of those processes
- Measure, recognise and accredit performance excellence across the industry
Tom McPhail, of Hargreaves Lansdown and Chair of the STAR Steering Committee
“We are delighted that Fairer Finance is supporting the STAR initiative. It’s vitally important to us that we continue to focus on the customer, and it will really help that we can harness the expertise of James and his team. We are pleased with wide-ranging and extensive industry support we have received and continue to receive, which will help galvanise the industry to forge ahead with change and to improve things for customers.”
James Daley, MD Fairer Finance
“The STAR initiative is an important move for the industry, and Fairer Finance is fully supportive and endorses the work they are doing. This is about the industry doing things better for their customers, and through STAR, the industry has the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to improving customers' outcomes in advance of the Regulator’s further paper based on the consultation due in Winter 2019. Some customers still have to wait for pension schemes to write out a cheque and post it to complete a transfer, which in this day and age, is hard to fathom. With reports of transfers regularly taking several months to complete, while banking is subject to a 7-day switching guarantee, it should be no surprise that the FCA has taken a keen interest in resolving the issue for consumers.”