Equifax, the US-headquartered credit monitoring company has had further bad news after it was forced to reveal that hackers had accessed information on 143 million people. The BBC and other outlets, such as the FT.com, are adding that the weakness in the Equifax system was known about as long ago as March, although the company claims to have only learnt of the breach in May — months after the vulnerability could have been easily fixed with an available update. This was not long after it was reported that Equifax had used the word "admin" as its login and password in Argentina. There are "serious concerns" about how the UK's investment consultancy industry operates, according to the UK Financial Conduct Authority which says the industry is too concentrated. It says the "big three" - Aon Hewitt, Mercer and Willis Towers Watson - control up to 80 per cent of the market by client assets. The FCA also says there are: potential conflicts of interest; barriers to entry; and a general lack of transparency over how decisions on which asset classes to invest in and which asset managers to use are arrived at. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority will now conduct the first full-scale investigation of the sector, the FT.com reports, adding that "there is already talk that other regulators around the world will take notice".