AgeWage has resigned its permissions to act as an introducer of regulated business and we are no longer regulated by the FCA.

This ends a four year experiment that started with our working in the FCA Innovation Sandbox to test our value for money scoring system. The sandbox research suggested that people did find knowing the value they’d got for their money helpful and that it would help them take decisions on consolidation but AgeWage has not monetised its capability and we now receive our revenues from activities that don’t need us to be regulated.

There are some fundamental costs of regulation which were holding back our business expanding as we wanted. We also found that being regulated was requiring us to commit to disclosures that were confusing our customers. Put simply, we weren’t selling them anything but were being regulated as if we were.

Like any good business we have a duty to our consumers and we will continue to operate the principles of the FCA’s Consumer Duty, with the same endeavour as before. But we have detached ourselves from what appears to be less of a cottage industry and more of a “shopping mall” of consumer duty compliance. When you find yourself going through the motions with no-one to practice your consumer duty on – you realise you are in the wrong regulatory space.

AgeWage wants to move on and become a solutions provider to the problems of the occupational pensions industry. Our spur is the Mansion House Reforms, our charger is the risk-sharing it encourages. We are already mounted and heading to the joust!

We will keep close to the FCA. It is a progressive regulator which has shown AgeWage much care and attention. We recognise that the plans we had in 2018 have changed with markets and we change with it.

So if you don’t see on our headers and advertisements, reference to AgeWage’s FCA registration, this is why!