Pimfa has launched a member manifesto, setting out the direction for its organisation for the first time since forming last year.
Over the next five years the trade body will focus on six core areas, including designing the sector for the future, enabling access to it, encouraging digital business transformation through a sector-wide digital strategy, ensuring proportional regulation, developing robust retail investment markets, and facilitating business security and protection.
The trade body stated their mission was to increase trust in the industry by driving better outcomes for consumers and showcasing Pimfa members as a force for good.
It also wants to foster a better savings culture by making it easier for consumers to seek financial advice.
In addition to the manifesto, Pimfa launched a financial crime platform in conjunction with Financial Crime Intelligence, which will allow members to record and communicate firms and individuals marked as high risk.
This platform, believed to be an industry first, will also allow members to form investigation units, sharing intelligence on criminal incidents.
Speaking at Pimfa's summer drinks reception in the House of Commons yesterday (19 June), chief executive Liz Field said: "This is your manifesto and it has been developed over several months in order to identify the key areas of focus that are required in order to achieve a set vision.
"We have recently been faced with the biggest raft of regulatory change in 20 years and now is the time to enhance education, build trust and forge a new era of understanding about our profession and the benefits it can bring."
Pimfa formed in June 2017, bringing together the Wealth Management Association and the Association of Professional Financial Advisers.
The body’s underlying objective is to create the optimal operating environment for firms to deliver their services and meet client needs.
This includes battling the perceived overregulation of the sector.
Pimfa's chairman John Gummer, Lord Deben, said Pimfa will continue to be a tough defender of the industry.
He said: "We have a huge need to be very clearly on the side of defending and protecting the trust of our customers and potential customers.
"We need that particularly today because even though we have a government which claims to be a deregulatory government it is very interesting that in the financial services sector it continues to be increasingly regulatory and indeed its kneejerk reaction to anything is regulation.
"And yet we all know that some of the problems that face people today face them because the regulations have been so unsuitable and because the regulator has very often not understood the basis of the businesses which are represented here."
Chartered Financial Planner Gary Bottriell, of Bottriell Adams, who is a Pimfa board member and attended the event in London, said the creation of Pimfa was beneficial to the industry and the combined body should be more capable of supporting it than the previous bodies.
