I was interested to read Gary Izzat's article (C-Zone, 10 February) and was pleased to see that regulatory reporting to the FSA is being taken seriously by firms and industry commentators alike.
However, there were a number of material inaccuracies in the article and it might be helpful to your readers if I set the record straight on these.
The new regulatory reporting regime for general insurance broking activity is being rolled out in two stages.
Phase1 starts on 1 April 2005. On this date, insurance brokers that came within the scope of FSA regulation for the first time on 14 January this year will begin collecting regulatory data for submission to the FSA.
The majority of these firms will be required to provide this information on a six-monthly basis using a web-based return (called the RMAR). Firms will start submitting the RMAR from 1 July 2005.
Larger brokers, that is those whose annual revenues from FSA regulated activities is greater than £5m, will be required to submit the financial components of their FSA returns every three months and non-financial data, for example, numbers of qualified staff or number of policies sold to retail customers, every six months. These firms will also use the RMAR.
Phase 2 covers insurance companies and other authorised firms - banks and investment firms - not captured by the 1 July roll-out.
The majority of these firms will not be required to complete the financial parts of the RMAR because they already submit financial data in another format.
We will be requiring these firms to provide non-financial data at a later date and will make an announcement in the autumn.
We will not, as correctly reported, be offering a system to system submission mechanism on 1 July but will make an announcement in the autumn when we announce our implementation timetable for Phase 2.
An information pack will be sent to all FSA authorised firms in the next week or so setting out more details. The information pack will also be available on our website.
Graeme Ashley-Fenn
Director - contact, revenue & information management
FSA
