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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is planning to make greater use of whistleblowers to uncover bad practice in finance sales.
Whistleblowing provides the FCA with insights from inside the firms and markets it regulates.
It said using whistleblowers helped it identify and correct problems including consumers being mis-sold loans, unauthorised firms taking on customers, and failings in firms’ own internal whistleblowing procedures.
It cites the example of a small Appointed Representative firm which mis-sold loans and was not treating customers fairly.
“Our supervision team reviewed the firm’s website and confirmed that the APR information it gave was contradictory.
“To protect consumers, we instructed the firm to publish the correct APR information on its website immediately.
“At the same time, we also directed the firm to our new consultation paper on the AR regime, to educate it on our expectations of these firms.”
Therese Chambers, executive director of Enforcement and Market Oversight, said: ‘We need the intelligence whistleblowers provide to identify and act on problems in the firms we regulate.
“We want to make sure we’re capturing and using the information provided by whistleblowers as effectively as possible, and to give them as much information as the law allows on how we have acted on their concerns.”