Thousands of independent financial advisers have spent
the past 10 weeks battling to file online regulatory returns with
the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
The FSA has pressed ahead with the introduction of mandatory
online filing despite being warned by the Association ofIndependent
Financial Advisers (Aifa), which represents 14,000 financial
advisers, that the new system would fail.
The system, Firms Online, was launched on 1 July ahead of an11
August deadline for online filing. This was put back to 9 September
after IFAs complained the new system could not cope with the number
of users trying to access it or the volumes of data they were
trying to upload.
"Aifa was involved in the pilot of the project and at the time
we warned the FSA of our concerns. Unfortunately many of them came
true," a representative of the organisation told Computer
Weekly.
"The system crashed. There were many serious technical problems
and firms had difficulties completing their returns."
Many IFAs found they could not upload sales data held on their
customer relationship management applications. According to Aifa,
the Firms Online site would crash or time out during the upload
process.
FSA spokesman Robin Gordon-Walker said, "There were times when
it was running a bit slow and it was difficult to access. It is
working; it just can't take the load."
The FSA is now looking at outsourcing its IT, which would
transfer the roles of "a few hundred people at most," a spokesman
said. The authority spent £14.2m on IT in the year to March.