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“What the industry needs is tools not rules.”

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29 Mar 2018

Campaigner and Transparency Taskforce founder Andy Agathangelou tells Mark Dunne about his fight to reduce the chances of another financial crisis.

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Campaigner and Transparency Taskforce founder Andy Agathangelou tells Mark Dunne about his fight to reduce the chances of another financial crisis.

How do you get on with the regulators?

I am amazed at how engaging all the regulators have been with the Transparency Taskforce. I would like to think that the FCA, TPR and CMA see our forum of well over 300 volunteers – 200 in the UK and 100 overseas – as a worthwhile group because we don’t have a particular agenda.

We are not coming at it from the perspective of a trade body or an association. We are a mix of all sorts of mavericks and individuals therefore we focus on building consensus.

So the ideas we come up with are clean of bias, we therefore tend to come up with some practical ideas and solutions to challenges, and that is reflected in the various white papers that we have had.

I would score our relationship with the FCA, CMA, TPR, the Advertising Standards Association and the Department of Work and Pensions all eights and nines out of 10. They come to our events, they speak at our conferences.

They are all doing great work, but if I was to criticise them it would be that they could work in a more joined up way. I was over the moon when I read recently that the FCA and TPR are starting to work more strategically together on industry issues. That is the kind of joined up working we need.

It is almost three years since you established the Transparency Taskforce, so are you happy with your progress?

Yes, happy that we are doing a good job and making progress. The massive constraint that we have is the lack of resource. I have some news on that front, but I cannot say too much. We have four asset managers who are supporting the Transparency Taskforce financially. This is a major breakthrough. This is proof that the Transparency Taskforce is on the side of industry. We are not the enemy of anybody. We are not trying to cause problems for any part of the industry at all.

Having four asset managers contributing financially to the running costs of the Transparency Taskforce says it all. I’d like to think it proves we have done a reasonable job of kicking-up about stuff in a constructive way but with never any  intent to cause harm or cause bad publicity, but a genuine attempt to encourage the industry to go further, faster. I think that that is great.

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