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The Regulatory Alliance of Mortgage Packagers (RAMP) is to form a new industry-wide compliance forum.

The new forum, which is aiming to have 12 delegates, is designed to better represent the differing views of all the mortgage industry. It is envisaged that the new group will comprise of four lenders, one packaging alliance (RAMP), two independent packagers, three directly authorised intermediaries and two networks

The new voice piece will be called The Mortgage Compliance Forum and its main purpose will be to engage the FSA and share views before policy decisions are made.

The FSA has said that it wants better industry cooperation, but the problem here is that although the new group will go some way to appeasing the regulator, there is still going to be a disjointed industry because of the number of rival groups to RAMP.

Correct me if I am wrong, but a quick glance around the Internet reveals there are the Professional Mortgage Packagers Alliance (PMPA), the Alliance of Mortgage Packagers and Distributors (AMPD) and the United Packagers Association (UPA) all doing a similar pre forum thing to RAMP and surely they will already have similar plans or their own ideas about compliance.

By either using a Boxing Association or Judean Peoples Front analogy, there just seems to be too many groups.

The secured loans specialist MoneyPartners has been the first organisation to sign up to the centralised password system Unipass.

Unipass is the free-to-use password system for the financial services sector in the UK and is one of the initiatives of Origo, the e-commerce standards agency.

The Unipass system alleviates the need for financial intermediaries having a different password and login for each of the organisations they interact with. Passwords are effectively replaced by each user having a digital certificate eliminating the need to re-key passwords for each site visit.

The Money Partners IT Manager Richard Davis said “I wholeheartedly encourage others to join us so that this broker-friendly system achieves critical mass as soon as possible. It took us less than 10 days to implement, so other lenders should have no difficulty prioritising it in their list of IT investments.”.

Now I’m a bit of an old hand at this IT lark and think these centralised password hub type things are a bit gimmicky.

Ok, you sign up to them and your people don’t have the awkwardness of remembering perhaps 16 characters and keying them into their computer - but ultimately, how will signing up to Unipass improve your bottom line?

For the last year the FSA has been working with mortgage firms to improve the standard of advertising and other promotional material.

In October and November this year it visited all the worst offenders and found that the same companies who were at fault with advertising also had deeper problems with processes and procedures. It has asked 200 morgage brokers to amend or withdraw misleading advertising and a number of companies have been referred to the FSA Enforcement Section for further investigation. During its investigation it also found examples of customers being sold Sub Prime mortgages when there was no evidence of credit impairment. This is actually a subject I’ve written about once or twice before and I’ve warned people that some brokers only deal in Sub Prime and to keep the customer, don’t inform them there are Prime rate alternatives.

As part of the press release about the investigation, Vernon Everitt, FSA retail themes director, said:

“Financial advertising has a massive influence on the decisions people make. So it must be clear, fair and not misleading, leaving people with a balanced picture of the key pros and cons. This is particularly the case in advertisements by mortgage brokers in the sub-prime market, where people are making one of the most important financial decisions of their lives. We need to see standards here rising - and fast.”

Given that advertising is one of the areas the FSA and OFT have combined forces on it is probably only a matter of months before the OFT come knocking on providers of Secured Loans doors.