Consumer Duty was never just a compliance job

Nearly two years on from the Consumer Duty, the most telling admission has come from the regulator itself. In a letter to the Chancellor last September, the FCA's chief executive acknowledged that some firms had taken an "unduly prescriptive or administrative approach" to the Duty. Read between the lines, and it is a quiet concession that much of the industry treated a customer-outcomes framework as a documentation exercise.

I understand how that happened. When the Duty landed, I was chairing a client insight committee at a regulated wealth firm, and any new regulation is handled first as legal sign-off, evidence packs and board reporting. Regulation arrives through compliance, so compliance picks it up, and the people who spend their working lives thinking about how clients understand things, what they value and how they experience a firm weren’t always in the room when the plans were drawn. All of that governance matters. But it pulled the Duty away from the function that should have been holding the pen on a good deal of it: marketing.

The four outcomes

Look again at the four outcomes the Duty is built on. Products and services. Price and value. Consumer understanding. Consumer support. Strip the regulatory language away and most of that is marketing's home ground: whether you understand who your clients are, whether they understand what you tell them, whether they can see the value they are paying for, and whether the experience you put them through is built around the client or around the firm. Those are marketing and client-experience questions, written into regulation.

If those four outcomes had been a marketing brief from the start, perhaps we would have run the whole thing differently.

Products and services

Start with products and services. The Duty asks whether a product is designed for the people it ends up with. That is a segmentation question before it is a compliance one. You cannot evidence that a product meets the needs of a target market you have never properly defined, and defining a market is what marketing exists to do. The target-market work behind the Duty is the same work that tells you who to talk to and what to build next.

Consumer understanding

Then consumer understanding. It is essential to have proper audience work behind this rather than a readability check on a terms document. Understanding is more than a font size. It means knowing your client's level of financial literacy, their life stage and what worries them, and writing to that. We have all sat across from someone who nodded warmly through a conversation and then rang the next morning, because they had not quite followed it. Closing that gap is the most human part of this whole framework, and it is marketing's work as much as compliance's. We test marketing communications on the people they are meant for before they go out. Most firms only test their Duty communications for whether they are accurate. Those are not the same standard, and the FCA has now said as much. Its newly published work on consumer understanding is, in plain terms, about whether a firm's communications help people make informed decisions.

Price and value

On price and value, fair value must be treated as a proposition question, not only a pricing spreadsheet. Fair value assessments have been one of the hardest parts of the Duty for wealth firms, and they remain a named FCA priority for the sector. A lot of that difficulty is that value is measured in finance and articulated nowhere. If a client cannot see the value they are paying for, that is a communication failure, and communication is marketing's to solve. A fair value assessment that sits in a spreadsheet no client ever reads protects the firm in a file. It does nothing for the client it is meant to serve.

Consumer support

And consumer support, the outcome firms talk about least. This is the part of the journey that happens after the sale, where most firms stop trying. The FCA's current review of customer journeys is looking specifically at how firms use friction at key points, the small obstacles that make a product easy to buy and hard to leave, query or complain about. Marketers have a name for that, and the good ones spend their careers removing it. How easy you make it for a client to act on their own behalf says more about whether you respect them than any onboarding brochure.

The regulator is moving this way

None of this is hindsight for its own sake, because the regulator is now moving in this direction. Of the four cross-cutting reviews the FCA has set out, three sit squarely in marketing and client-experience territory: consumer understanding, the design of customer journeys and the use of friction, and whether communications help people make informed decisions. The framework that arrived as a compliance requirement is now being judged, two years on, against questions marketing has always owned.

What I would do now

So what would I do now, sitting in a wealth firm reading this? I would stop treating the Duty as a static evidence file and start treating it as a live brief. I would put the same rigour into knowing who my clients are, and whether they understand and value what we do, that I would put into any campaign. I would test communications on clients, not just sign them off. I would map the journey from the client's side and take out the friction I found. And I would make the firm's value legible, in language a client recognises, rather than defensible only in a spreadsheet.

I have a lot of sympathy for the compliance teams here. They were handed something that was never wholly theirs to carry, and they have carried it well. But at its best, the Duty describes something far warmer than a compliance burden: what it feels like to be well looked after by a firm you trust. That has always been marketing's territory, and client experience's, and it still is. The regulator has effectively written wealth firms a marketing brief. Treat it as one, and looking after the client and satisfying the regulator turn out to be the same job.