The cost is in the reconstruction
For most firms the pain of a request is not the request itself. It is reconstructing what happened after the fact, from systems that were never built to prove it, chasing reviewers and piecing together email threads.
That reconstruction ties up your best people for weeks and still leaves gaps a regulator can reasonably question.
Capture the record as advice happens
If every recommendation, review and decision is recorded at the time, the evidence is already assembled when the request arrives. Producing it becomes a search and an export, not a project.
The difference between weeks and minutes is entirely whether the record was built in advance or scrambled together afterwards.
Know what a good evidence pack contains
For a piece of advice, expect to show the recommendation and the information it was based on, who reviewed it and against what checks, the decision and its reasoning, the dates, and any vulnerability or fair-value considerations.
Be able to assemble that per client, per adviser, or per advice type, because you will not know in advance which way the request will be framed.
Make the proof verifiable
Evidence is worth only as much as its credibility. Records a regulator can independently confirm are genuine and unchanged remove the "did you alter this later" question entirely.
That lets the conversation move on to the substance of the advice rather than the integrity of your systems.
Rehearse it once
Pick a client at random and try to produce the full pack. If it takes more than minutes, that gap is the thing to close now, in the quiet, rather than under a deadline with the regulator waiting.