ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the market changes that have taken, and the development of regulation that grew out of them and as a response to the difficulties that regulators experienced in getting the new regime to be taken seriously. The process arguably began in the early 1980s with the venture in estate agency. A buoyant housing market developed into a boom and estate agents were seen as a vital access route to sell mortgages and then endowment and house structure and contents insurance, and maybe beyond that other product, notably pensions. There are two aspects to the development of regulation: the adaptation of the financial services industry to a new regime and the development and in particular the specification of regulation itself. The greatest abuses in the endowment field were in the sales process, with direct sales forces recruited off the street, given minimal training and sent off to do their best amongst their friends and relations.
