HEALTH CHECKS AND REVIEWS

Effecta review services – How can we help?

Engaging Effecta for a Regulatory Health Check or a Compliance Assurance Review can help maintain and improve your internal compliance controls and standards, reduce overheads, and mitigate compliance risks within your firm therefore allowing senior management to focus more time on its core business activities and delivering positive outcomes for clients. Effecta can help bring a fresh perspective on improvements and enhancements to your established compliance practices, as well as being able to support immediate and medium-term resourcing needs by helping manage any regulatory projects or by providing interim compliance resources via a secondment arrangement or on-going compliance retainer services.

Effecta Regulatory Health Check

An FCA Health Check usually consists of an end-to-end review of the firm’s compliance infrastructure and processes, including all your related policies and procedures and other business and compliance records. A pre-visit discussion with the compliance and relevant senior management team would be followed up with an initial documentation request. The initial offsite review of the information requested would be followed by an onsite visit, where possible, including interviews with key members of staff and walk-throughs of key systems, culminating in a detailed report of findings and recommendations.

The documentation request and areas of general or specific review (depending on your business activities) should include the following items:

• Compliance documentation to include Compliance Manuals, Monitoring Programme and the associated policies and procedures
• KYC/CDD, AML and Financial Crime
• Compliance Registers
• Remuneration Policy
• Stewardship Code
• Senior Management, Employees, Agents and Other Relevant Persons, to include the SM&CR regime
• Significant Outsourcing Arrangements
• FCA Regulated Activities in relation to your business activities.
• Capital Adequacy, Financial Reporting and ICAAP (where applicable)
• Controllers and Close Links
• Marketing function and Financial Promotions
• Business Continuity Plan
• Training requirements and Staff Competency Assessments
• Conflicts of Interest
• Personal Account Dealing arrangements
• Inducements, Gifts, Entertainments and Anti Bribery
• Market Abuse
• Whistleblowing
• Appointed Representative review*

* One important consideration to note is that a Health Check review should also include any Appointed Representatives that you, as the principal firm, may have oversight for.

The Appointed Representatives regime is one area of the regulations that the FCA has been paying more attention to in recent years. Following an FCA review back in May 2019 of principal firms who “host” firms and with a number of Appointed Representative failures having taken place, the FCA found most principal firms within their survey “had weak or under-developed governance arrangements in place”. The Effecta team have many years of experience of the Appointed Representative regime and are well positioned to help you with a review and ongoing advice that may be required in this specific area.

Effecta Compliance Assurance review

An Effecta Assurance review will focus more on your scope of business and high-level controls and can be helpful when starting your business or reviewing any expansion plans or proposed new business lines.

This should include a review of your:

• FCA Regulated Activities in relation to your business activities.
• Capital Adequacy and Financial Reporting.
• Non-financial reports and notification to the FCA.
• Compliance documentation.
• Compliance corporate governance reporting.
• Senior Management systems and controls and compliance policies.
• The compliance function itself to including independence and resourcing.

Our Health Checks and Assurance review services are usually provided on a one-off or annual basis with the scope of each Health Check or Assurance review being agreed in advance. These reviews can also be specifically tailored and focused to certain issues or concerns, if required.

The Effecta team has experience of undertaking these reviews for many types of regulated firms and if you would like to discuss our services or a bespoke review, please contact us.