FSCA record of advice requirements: the section 9 checklist

Every FAIS audit, every FSCA onsite visit and every ombud complaint eventually arrives at the same document: the record of advice. Section 9 of the General Code of Conduct is short, but the gap between what it says and what sits in most client files is where practices get hurt. Here is the requirement in plain language, and the gaps that actually surface in reviews.

What section 9 requires

The adviser must keep, and provide to the client in writing, a record that covers three things:

1. The basis of the advice. A brief summary of the information and material on which the advice was based: the client's circumstances, needs analysis, and what the client disclosed.
2. What was considered. The financial products which were considered in arriving at the recommendation, not only the one that was sold.
3. What was recommended, and why. The product or products recommended, with an explanation of why the product selected is likely to satisfy the client's identified needs and objectives.

The "why" is the part that matters. A file that shows what was sold but not the reasoning that connects the client's situation to the recommendation is exactly what section 9 exists to prevent. If the advice involves replacing an existing product, the disclosure duties are heavier still: the client must be told the actual and potential costs and consequences of the replacement.

Retention and retrieval

Advice records must be kept for at least five years after the advice was given or the product terminated, and they must be retrievable: the FSCA does not care which system you use, but a record you cannot produce on request is a record that does not exist. Practices switching CRMs or advisers inheriting books discover this the hard way.

The gaps that surface in audits

• The missing middle. Files show the FNA and the policy schedule, but no record connecting them: what was considered and why this product won.
• Generic reasoning. The same paragraph of boilerplate "suitability" text in every client file. Auditors read files side by side; identical reasoning for different clients reads as no reasoning.
• The time gap. RoAs written weeks after the meeting, reconstructed from memory. The longer the gap, the thinner and less accurate the record.
• Replacement advice without the comparison. Section 8 replacement disclosures missing or incomplete where one product was swapped for another.
• Verbal-only variations. Client instructions or scope limitations discussed in the meeting but never recorded.

Why the gaps exist

Not because advisers do not know the rules. Because a proper RoA takes real time after every meeting, and meetings compound faster than admin hours do. The record is the last task of a long day, so it gets thinner, later, and more templated. That is a workflow problem, not a knowledge problem, and it has a workflow answer: we wrote about the time economics in how long does a record of advice take, and about the document itself in our plain-language RoA guide.

This is also exactly the shape of work Tallify, our product for financial planners, does: drafting the record from the adviser's own meeting notes on the same day, with every document crossing the adviser's desk before it counts. The reasoning stays the adviser's; the writing stops eating the evening.