By Leah Milner

Brokers have been urged to use technology to help ensure they have an audit trail to protect themselves against future mis-selling scandals.

Paul Holden, sales director of Mortgage Stream, says: "For many years now we have had all sorts of retrospective legistlation where someone decides that something that was considered to be a good, is no longer considered to be, such as Additional Voluntary Contributions, mortgage endowments and all sorts of things that were 'top of the pops' at one stage but are now considered to be not so good.

"I can see that happening perhaps with other products, for example self-cert and equity release.

"If you want to get involved with these products then you want an audit trail, so that you can prove that you have done the job properly."

He adds that call recording systems are one way of using technology to keep a full audit trail and that by brokers repeating their advice back to customers over the telephone and then keeping the recordings on file they can help ensure that they are not open to accusations of offering bad advice.