A “fair and personal analysis of the market” means providing services on the basis of a sufficiently large number of contracts and product producers available on the market to enable the intermediary to make a recommendation, in accordance with professional criteria, regarding which contract would be adequate to meet the consumer’s needs.
The number of providers considered must be sufficiently large to enable you to recommend a product that would be adequate to meet the consumer’s needs.
The term ‘sufficiently large’ must be considered in the context of the product or service provided and the extent of the relevant market. The number of providers that constitutes ‘sufficiently large’ will vary depending on the number of providers operating in the market for a particular product or service and their relative importance in and share of that market. Firms must consider the extent of the market and select an appropriate amount of providers that would constitute a fair and personal analysis of that market.
The extent of fair and personal analysis must be such that it could be reasonably expected of a professional conducting business, taking into account the accessibility of information and product placement to intermediaries and the cost of the product search.
In order to ensure that the number of contracts and providers is sufficiently large to constitute a fair and personal analysis of the market, you should consider the following criteria:
▪ the needs of the customer,
▪ the size of the customer order,
▪ the number of providers in the market that deal with intermediaries,
▪ the market share of each of those providers,
▪ the number of relevant products available from each provider,
▪ the availability of information about the products,
▪ the quality of the product and service provided by the provider,
▪ cost, and
▪ any other relevant consideration.
Fair and personal analysis refers to a reasonable amount of choice given the product and the market circumstances. It does not oblige you to deal with all firms and you retain the commercial freedom not to engage with certain firms should you so wish for valid commercial reasons. However, to achieve fair and personal analysis an intermediary should ordinarily take into account the products of a reasonable majority of the product providers accessible to it in the relevant market (specialist providers with a small market share may be disregarded for this purpose).
Where you exclude one or more product providers with a significant market share in the relevant market from the analysis you must explain this clearly to the consumer.
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