FCA have finally decided to take action against Neil Woodford. But he did not act alone, he was supported by a firm called Capita, renamed Link, who were the Authorised Corporate Director for his fund. They were in charge, in charge of compliance in the fund, and dropped the ball.
BAT also works in compliance, as an automated compliance tool, and if you feed the correct data into the tool, using CSV files, automated links and fees from your new business book, it will deliver the information to run your practice compliant manner. You still have to take decisions, but they are easier with the data to hand.
Woodford was the low hanging fruit, a one time marketing genius, but he did not carry prime responsibility… Interesting for compliance people is the lack of regulatory sanctions against individuals at Capita (now known as Link) who acted as ACD for the fund.
Capita – Link has an unsurpassed record of taking money for being ACD and doing very little in return. They also run pension schemes for local councils, the military and the NHS and handle the BBC licence fee. They have been deeply involved in affairs of government. Capita, now known as Link, are members of the establishment, and they look after their own.
In 2009 Arch Cru holdings failed due to liquidity problems, and their ACD – Capita – were duly were let off without a fine, and with no sanctions against individuals.
Then Capita had a similar problem again in 2017 with liquidity in the Connaught Income Fund which also failed. Once again, they were let off without a fine, and with no sanctions against individuals.
So it is no surprise to see Capita, now known as Link, fail again, you really could not make this stuff up.
BAT also takes the utmost care with your data – it always belongs to you and we do our utmost to ensure it is safe. All access is via 2FA only, with no text messages used for codes – it is known that hackers can intercept text messages. Any data breach for BAT would be fatal, and we work on this continually. Currently the data is being siloed into separate data bases for each firm (rather than separate locations inside the same database, and this makes the system even more secure.