Picture the scene.

It’s a pleasant morning in the office. The sun is shining through the window on your invigorating cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain, and all is well with the world. You have a to-do list that is manageable with a bit of effort, and might allow you to log off at a sensible time.

Then an email lands in your inbox.

There’s a meeting ahead with the FCA and your boss has to be up to speed on everything the regulator’s produced recently on the subject of advice.

You’ve been keeping up to speed with developments, but you have a morning to provide a briefing note with dates, names of consultations, what it all means and when we can expect to see anything new. By lunchtime.

In one world, this could have meant a long trawl through the FCA website, which is not the most user-friendly of interfaces. Wasn’t there something from the DWP that was relevant as well? And I’m sure somebody made a speech, I can’t remember when, or who it was, but there was something in it that made an excellent point?

But that is not the world you inhabit.

You subscribed to the lang cat Tracker, a service looking right across the regulatory and legislative world, updating when new publications are issued, showing when consultations open and close, linking to relevant pages and giving commentary on how it all fits in.

You search ‘advice’ and get this:

You can see that the advice guidance boundary review consultation has closed, and that we’re waiting for a response. The FCA has written to other firms about their delivery of ongoing advice. And that speech you were thinking about was by Nikhil Rathi in March. 

Most recently, there was a dump of documents when the FCA published its review of retirement income advice. In an ideal world, you’d have time to re-read them all, but happily you can see there’s a link to an article in which lang cat Mike summarises the main points while resisting the urge to talk about cricket.

You have the briefing paper done with time to spare, which gives you the opportunity to listen to the podcast from Tom McPhail on the advice guidance boundary review, which explains how it all fits with the work of the DWP.

Lunchtime and you’re back on track. Time for another cup of coffee.

Advice professionals who subscribe to Analyser get Tracker as part of their subscription, for everyone else you can find out more here.