All the major retail banks and most medium-sized and smaller firms have made "significant" changes to their sales incentive schemes, but concerns over enticements linked to bank investment and protection sales remain, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) reports.
For large banks, some of the most significant reductions in incentive risks have been in branches and call centres, such as among staff who sell products such as current and packaged accounts.
However, it added "some higher risk schemes still remain in other areas of banks, such as investment and protection sales".
The regulator has provided an update on a thematic review of firms' sales incentive schemes, which uncovered widespread risks. The review did not include or involve advisory businesses.
Things have improved considerably, it said: three banks had completely removed the direct link to sales from some or all of their incentive schemes.
However, it said the picture was mixed when it came to medium-sized and smaller firms.
Though it had seen improvements, and received assurances that firms were in the middle of bettering their schemes, it estimated that about one in ten firms with sales teams had higher risk incentive features (for example, product bias) where it appeared they were not properly managing the risk of incentives causing mis-selling, so improvements were not across the board.
"Most firms with incentive schemes had at least some improvements to make at the time of our assessment," it concluded.
