Regulatory Compliance

Auxillias are consumer credit experts with a solid foundation that comes from years of working in the sector. We deliver both legal and compliance services for clients, as in our experience, appointing a compliance firm separate from a legal firm on consumer credit related legal and compliance projects does not deliver high standards when it comes to achieving clients overall objectives and results.

Auxillias provide a high standard, efficient and cost-effective solution to help clients reach both their legal and regulatory compliance objectives.

Here are some examples of our work:

 

Providing compliance support to lenders, brokers and dealers to meet their regulatory obligations on both regulated and unregulated finance transactions and support the build of strong operations and good governance.

 

Conducting compliance audits, product and documentation reviews; this includes running a gap analysis of regulatory standards, policy, procedures and day-to-day practices, as well as training teams to a high level standard to effectively carry out their daily tasks in these specialist market sectors.

 

Reviewing firms’ compliance structures, arrangements and processes to assist in compliance with the FCA regulatory regime.

 

FCA, governance, SM&CR people and culture implementation support in order to meet the FCA rules and guidance on culture and the requirements of the SM&CR regime.

 

Legal and Regulatory advice to brokers and dealers including support on all legal terms and conditions, documentation drafting and ensuring the implementation of effective and compliant sales processes, remuneration structures.

 

Supporting technology, automation, payments and online origination and financing.

 

Building the necessary management information and dashboards for compliance monitoring and evidencing platforms, to meet regulatory standards to support regulatory scrutiny to include the need to demonstrate compliance whenever there is a complaint or regulatory intervention.

 

Compliance audits – independent reviews and health checks to make sure your systems, controls, policies and procedures stay up to date.

 

Advising on customer vulnerability, discrimination issues and arrears management policies.

 

Providing compliance function-specific training for individuals and firms.

 

Business continuity management and assessment, formulating crisis management plan, incident response plan and business continuity planning.

 

Compliance Incident management – development of framework, process maps and escalation matrix for the management of internal compliance incidents for matters to be escalated to wider stakeholders.

 

Training – providing training to improve risk and control capabilities, development of training programme to ensure high levels of compliance awareness and education across an organisation, driving positive behavioural and cultural change.

 
 

Helping clients assess the impact of new regulatory guidance, new rules and regulations, the implementation of policy and legislation to ensure that they meet their market sector strategies and market standards.

 

Advising on the launch of new products and carrying out product reviews on finance products as well as product testing.

 

In-house training for staff across the business, from sales, operations, collections, recoveries, through to firms’ complaint handling operations.

 

Implementation of the Consumer Credit sourcebook proportionate to our clients’ business and bespoke to its industry.

 

The review of dealer and broker onboarding policies and procedures, monitoring and supervision and escalation models to meet FCA requirements. For example, we have supported clients to fully implement the FCA findings of the motor finance review.

 

Building strong infrastructure to meet the FCA treating customers fairly requirements, as well as customer outcome-focused business models.

 

Compliance management – installing and managing your Compliance Monitoring Programme.

 

Compliance health checks so that your systems and controls are appropriate for consumer credit and FCA regulation.

 

Independent audits on Point of Sale finance or other aspects of CONC compliance.

 

File review and compliance monitoring checks to ensure that you’re following your policies and procedures. This might be a review of your sales or complaints operation, collections and recoveries or management of your intermediaries.

 

Compliance framework and design - build simple, universal and integrated framework that spans all compliance areas to capture compliance requirements: risk, policies, procedures, controls, monitoring .

 

Third party compliance programme – considering third party risk and compliance, due diligence, including creation of risk analysis, risk evaluation and framework.

 

Support with external auditors and regulators - preparing guidance on engagement with external stakeholders and regulators, how to interact with these organisations and attending any meetings.

 Rectifications and Remediations

As experts in the non-contentious sphere, we have the knowledge of the mechanics of regulations which other contentious lawyers may not. We can assist our clients to navigate their way through regulation to ensure that they remain compliant with it, in such a way that also furthers their commercial interests. The same is true of disputes in the regulatory arena. We assist our clients with notifications to the FCA, rectification activity and, where relevant or necessary, assist them with disciplinary procedures or court action. We ensure that our clients’ interests remain protected and their reputation remains intact throughout such issues.

 Collections, Recoveries and Litigation

We build our clients’ operations to ensure that the end-to-end collections, recoveries and litigation process meets the legal and regulatory standards required. This includes full implementation of CONC as well as the build of the Consumer Credit documentation, and expected TCF requirements. This service has been more popular since the pandemic, as clients have had to prioritise the importance of building a robust collections and recoveries policy, procedure and evidencing requirements, and ensuring that the FCA’s temporary guidance on granting financial relief to customers is built into a segmented customer recovery plan process, whether this be digital or by way of a manual script. We have supported clients in rebuilding their collections process to combine CONC 6, CONC 7, Principle 6 and Principle 7 with the FCA’s temporary relief guidance, and have trained their team of collectors to ensure that they meet the requirements set out by the regulator.