Firms have to comply with an increasingly wide range of regulations governing every aspect of the business, in order to keep both clients and employees safe. The real challenge can often come in adapting the business to comply with new rules, without clients perceiving any changes in the quality of service they receive. This can be something akin to running a train company – striving to deliver a comfortable passenger experience every time while adhering to a vast array of safety regulations that most passengers simply never need to think about, which are designed to do their utmost to ensure that crews and travellers alike are kept safe from harm. The vast safety regulations governing train companies have developed over the years in response to historic accident levels, in order to make train travel among the safest forms of transport – roughly 15 to 25 times safer than driving a car, according to the Rail Passengers Association.
Which rules are we subject to? First and foremost, we are of course governed by regulation from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – their handbook alone contains several thousand rules governing JM Finn’s conduct. Keeping up to speed with these rules is a full-time job for our dedicated compliance team. While regulation always comes with varying degrees of satisfaction, the UK’s financial regulation system is widely regarded as giving UK consumers among the highest standards of protection in the world. Among the key principles under its Consumer Duty rules are a duty to avoid foreseeable harm to customers and to act with integrity, which I’m sure everyone will agree are laudable.
One area that exemplifies some of the challenges are the data protection laws such as GDPR – which impose strict rules about the way firms handle and process your data. Regulations from different laws and bodies mean that we frequently have to carry out risk-based assessments to determine how best to act in a way that will be in the best interests of both clients and staff.
Our duty to our clients and employees doesn’t stop at the office. Upcoming changes to the Employment Rights Act 2025 are set to come into force from October 2026 and will move the bar higher to make employers liable if our employees experience any form of harassment from third parties such as our counterparts, suppliers or customers.
Similar to the challenges faced by the country’s rail operators, legislation that helps to keep all of us safe can only be a positive: keeping our clients and employees protected has helped JM Finn endure as a firm for 80 years – and we welcome any new developments that will enable us to continue to do so.
