Consumer Duty is set to come into force on 31st July 2023. According to the Elephants Don’t Forget guide, it will be the biggest change in conduct regulation for more than a decade.
First and foremost, what is Consumer Duty? It is a standard introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for companies to have in place to meet the required standard of consumer protection and support. These regulations will apply mostly to retail financial markets.
We can view the Duty through different lenses and perceptions to see how it will impact different areas and people. In Elephants Don’t Forget’s guide, they view the Duty through the lens of culture, compliance, risk and operations. The guide assesses how deploying their AI-power assessments has seen substantial improvements in business performance and customer-focused metrics.
Consumer Duty: setting expectations
With this new guide looking at how the Duty will permeate cultures and operations, let’s look at the FCA’s expectations on this. The concerns and challenges are firstly proposed as the following in the guide:
- Some firms may narrowly be viewing the Duty in the guise of Treating Customers Fairly (TCF). However, just complying with existing rules is not what the Duty is about, and will not be sufficient in this case. Companies will need to go far beyond this.
- The FCA recognised resistance to the Duty because it will require ‘enormous culture and operational change’. It is a lot for organisations to take on, but will reap great rewards once executed. It is a long haul to prepare for.
- The Duty poses 2 challenges in of itself: those that are “desk-based” (Terms & Conditions, products and processes); and those that are holistic (e.g. culture and people).
The Duty will require all parties to be focused, reliable and competent. Especially those employees who deliver the service to your customers will be responsible for interpreting the Duty requirements. This will mean that sufficient and effective training strategies should be implemented. The Elephants Don’t Forget guide has offered many useful considerations for these strategies, which you can read more about when downloaded from our site.
How Elephants Don’t Forget can support your Consumer Duty strategies
The new guide has offered 3 interesting and helpful use cases to help you learn. This includes:
- How Moneybarn improved customer outcomes by 9% and achieved a 300% ROI from their training investment in just six months.
- How Age Partnership improved advisor speed-to-competency by 30% to support their quality assurance outcomes.
- How Volvo Car Financial Services UK culturally changed the perception of annual compliance testing for their employees and surpassed their annual compliance testing targets by 11%.
Elephants Don’t Forget have provided insights that the average pre-intervention level of employee knowledge and competence is just 54%. This percentage must be at a higher figure to execute Consumer Duty successfully.
Download the full guide from Elephants Don’t Forget on the CXM website today. Learn more and help your application of Consumer Duty be carried out successfully.