For investment firms, private banks and financial advisers
When a client says the investment was unsuitable, show the assessment as it was on the day.
Markets fall, and some clients then remember a different conversation. What settles it is the suitability assessment and the statement on suitability you gave before the transaction. What weakens it is any doubt that those documents are the ones you had at the time, rather than ones tidied up once the loss was known.
- When it is tested
- A complaint after a loss, taken to your national financial ombudsman; a supervisor’s inspection of your advice files; a claim against your professional liability cover; a court.
- What you will be asked for
- The information you obtained on the client’s knowledge, experience, financial situation and objectives (MiFID II, Article 25(2)), and the statement on suitability given before the transaction (Article 25(6)). Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/565, Article 72(1), describes how records are to be kept: so that corrections, and the contents before them, can be easily ascertained, and so that records cannot otherwise be manipulated or altered.
- What goes wrong today
- The assessment lives in an advice tool, a CRM or a document store, and any of them can be edited by someone with the right access. Their audit trail is that system’s own word. A risk profile updated innocently after a loss looks exactly like one changed to win the complaint.
- What changes
- Each assessment and each statement is sealed the moment it is produced, by your advice software or by hand. A correction becomes a new sealed version, so the original stays provable beside it. In a dispute you hand over the document and its receipt, and the other side checks both themselves. The client’s data never reaches us: only a salted fingerprint does.
Sealing shows that a record existed unchanged from a given moment; whether your record-keeping meets Article 72 is yours to judge. The MiFID II record template lists the fields to keep and the article each one answers.
Try it in two minutes
- Download a sample statement on suitability (fictional client).
- Seal it on Seal a file. A free sandbox key is issued on the page; the file is never uploaded.
- Change one word in the sample, then check it against its receipt at Check. It fails; the original passes.
From your own advice software it is one API call per document. Integrate · The case for your software vendor