Consumer Duty: A clear way forward

The Consumer Duty sets higher standards of consumer protection across financial services, requiring firms to evidence and monitor whether their products and services are delivering good customer outcomes and how they plan to fix any issues unearthed.

Firms are required to evidence how their products and services perform against four outcomes:

• Products and services are fit for purpose
• Consumers are receiving a fair price and value
• Firms’ communications support consumer understanding to enable them to make informed decisions 
• Firms are providing support to meet the consumer’s needs.

The FCA will be assessing progress on the above outcomes through two lenses:

• Culture Change: how corporate governance, business models and company culture are focused on identifying and continually delivering good outcomes for consumers
• Consumer Testing: how firms continually review products, services and communications to deliver good outcomes for consumers.

To deliver against the Duty firms need to put in place robust plans to regularly monitor and assess their products and services against the outcomes and evidence steps taken to improve where appropriate.

The Ipsos offer

We can help you understand how you’re performing against the Duty outcomes, establishing regular monitoring and reviews to ensure you know what’s working, where to improve and the impact of those improvements.

Across the lenses of culture and consumer, we’ll support you to:

• Understand: we’ve worked closely with the FCA to create a set of diagnostic questions to indicate your performance on the four Duty outcomes. In combination with our Financial Research Survey (FRS) we’ll tell you where you sit against your competitors, where to focus your efforts. We can also tell you how your external stakeholders view your Duty implementation.
• Improve: we’ll provide a tailored service from our portfolio of products and expertise based on your identified needs to support you in taking corrective action where products or services fall short of the Duty outcomes or to future proof new products and services.
• Monitor: we’ll bring together the reporting on your cultural and consumer focused activities, so you can holistically understand and assess your progress on delivering against the Duty.

Table of contents

1. Introduction to Consumer Duty: A clear way forward
2. Creating and Embedding Cultural Change
3. Building Stronger Stakeholder Relationships Through Consumer-Centric Culture
4. Innovating with Financial Service Customers in Mind
5. Improving Consumer Duty Outcomes Through Customer Experience
6. Using Mystery Shopping to proactively measure staff engagement with Consumer Duty