A July issue of Investors Chronicle looks at RDR.

I should have commented on this article earlier but I did'nt. Sorry about that!!
A July issue of the Investors Chronicle got Martin Bamford and Jonathan Fry, well-known independent financial advisers (IFAs), to comment on the proposals of the Financial Services Authority (FSA)
with its retail distribution review (RDR).
Bamford is a chartered financial planner from Informed Choice while Fry runs his own
firm Jonathan Fry & Co. Fry was against the review proposals while Bamford was for.
As a consumer of financial advice I kind of side with Fry that paying directly for financial advice would not help low-income groups. The fee payments would come from taxed income and might be considerable. However, I have sympathy with Bamford's assertion that the commission bias of independent financial advice has led to the slew of recent investment scandals (with-profits anyone?). There is also a tendency for investment bonds to be recommended by IFAs, which is not very impartial.
Fry also notes that the British financial regulator FSA lives in an utopian world
He considers that more disclosure of costs would help
consumers.
Anyway with the Conservatives proposing to scrap the FSA, if it wins the next general election, then it will be interesting what will happen to the RDR.
I had to do some pension transfers recently and it was saddening to realise that I was paying three sets of costs with the money. First, the independent financial adviser (IFA),
second the Royal London unit Scottish Life and third the various investment fund managers. However, in
the IFA's defence there has had to be quite a bit chasing up in terms of the pension funds making the transfers. One source of delay is anti money-laundering legislation
and I wonder if the checks could be speeded up. Nobody would want to send their passport to a pension fund manager by post and then hope to get it back by the same postal system. An email could have sufficed with my passport number.
However, the chunks taken out by the various parties (the IFA, the pension fund platform and the investment fund managers) will mean that investment returns will have to be spot-on to get anywhere.