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Following on from the post about the FSA saying to treat customers fairly (TCF), the FSA has now updated its website with a new section targeted at small businesses.

Recognising the fact that there tends to be a lack of resources in small businesses, the FSA says that rather than having formalised documents etc. small firms should take a step back and look at its operations, identify areas of risk to its customers, and consider how to remove or mitigate them.

Although not updated since last year, the new section of the website contains a PDF document which outlines the FSA’s ideas on TCF for small firms.

The subjects covered include financial promotions, advice and sales process, training, accurate and timely record keeping, disputes and complaint handling, flow of information and risk assessment.

In the next few months the FSA will be conducting a telephone survey to 900 small businesses about TCF and at some stage next year will be visiting a sample of the firms who answered the survey questions. In April 2007 the FSA will publish a review on the number of companies who have or haven’t met the March deadline for implementing a TCF policy.

A story I find quite interesting today is one that the Daily Mail owned website thisismoney has signed a deal with paaleads to sell its leads.

Paaleads is owned by moneysupermarket and is basically an Ebay style system where people in the financial world can bid for leads generated by other sites.

So in this case, people go onto the thisismoney website and log their interest, in say a mortgage, the lead is then passed to the paaleads site where it is put up for auction and the highest bidder gets the lead.

This sort of system is not unique and there are several other buying and selling networks for affiliates, but perhaps paaleads will become the largest one. The site also has a similar deal with its parent company Moneysupermarket as well as Moneyweb, Yourmortgage and Mymortgagekey.

Paaleads separates out the leads into things like Mortgage, Remortgage, Adverse and Pensions advice and also lets people just bid on leads within a particular geographic region. It also has a facility where a monthly budget of lead spend can be set up.

All very interesting, but I wonder if the users of these so-called comparison sites really know what goes on behind the scenes.

The Money Debt and Credit group (MDCG) started to trade on the stock market today. The organisation has a capitalisation of £10million and raised £3million (gross) through its recent flotation.

This again increases the number of listed companies dealing in IVAs and it will be interesting to see what happens to the industry in the coming months. As you may have heard, the various government bodies have said they will not regulate the market for now and this has led to a self-regulatory body being formed.

Being wary that the dramatic increase in IVAs is increasing their write offs, the banks are being very vocal about the industry and the IVA industry is ping-ponging the comments back by saying the banks should lend more responsibly in the first place.

As most of the companies involved in IVAs are pretty small fry, it is an absolute certainty that there will be some industry consolidation in the next few months.

For your interest, I’ve listed out all the LSE companies I could find dealing in IVAs and I’ve attempted to add a rough percentage of how much they say their turnover has increased in the last reporting period and also included a listing date. Some of the businesses deal purely in IVAs, whereas others complement them by dealing in things like Secured Loans. You can see from the list that nearly all of them were floated quite recently.

Debts.co.uk (DETS) - Listed May 2006 - turnover up 79.3%
Accuma Group PLC (ACG) - Listed March 2006 - turnover up 250%
Debt Free Direct (DFD) - Listed December 2002 - turnover up 91% (Interims)
Debtmatters Group (DEBT) - Listed June 2005 - 465% (Interims)
Cleardebt Group PLC (CLEA) - Listed February 2006 - difficult to establish turnover increase, but impressive month on month growth in IVAs. Cleardebt was renamed from Carrwood PLC.
Invocas Group PLC (INVO) - March 2006 - 50% increase (Interims). Deals in Protected Trust Deeds (Scottish equivilant of IVAs)
Compass Finance Group PLC to rename to the Debt Advisor Group. Recently entered IVA market through an acquisition earlier this year.