Navigating Consumer Duty

Managing the complexity of Consumer Duty through partnerships that demonstrate value

Over the past six months we’ve been working closely with our financial services clients on all things Consumer Duty. And it’s become increasingly apparent that there’s a big opportunity for insight agencies and consultancies to work in purposeful partnership with their clients to navigate a complex and important challenge laid out by the FCA.

While the word partnership is often used to describe the relationship between agency and client, the opportunities to evidence the value of it can be variable. However, Consumer Duty is certainly one of those occasions, and something we should be grabbing with both hands to demonstrate the importance of customer insight in driving improvement for organisations.

Customer insight is needed to ensure Consumer Duty is understood and acted on fully. Insight teams need strong agency partners to help guide on best practice, by capitalising on a broad experience and wider expertise.

So, here’s our six top tips that we’ve learnt on the way, and have been able to help our clients with:

1. What do I test: A good starting point is product related customer communications – this can include marketing, onboarding and servicing communications.
2. How do I prioritise: First identify the end-to-end comms journey of the product or service, the individual comms, and then the intended impact of the comms on the consumer (especially if there is a call to action).
3. What research method do I use: Start with the level of complexity of products or services you sell, and this can be a good marker. For simplicity and scale quant is more likely, for more involved communications, complex products and services, niche audiences, a form of qualitative research is the place to start.
4. How does this work with comms testing I already have in place: Start with the principle to build on what you have, not to completely reinvent. You don’t want to have to over invest and may already have some form of testing in place. Agencies have great depth of expertise in comms creation, development and testing, which is also a great asset to draw on.
5. What results do I focus on: Use pre-defined KPIs to help you focus on the communications that need attention, but it’s also important to additionally prioritise based on the level of impact on the consumer.
6. What do I do next: In the short term, depending on the outcome of the test, consider how best to enhance and revaluate. Longer term, consider the Consumer Duty framework as something that becomes part of your established research and insight toolkit, building on already existing best practice.

Getting prepared for Consumer Duty

We offer two solutions that will help you plan and prepare for the new regulations coming into effect on 31^st July 2023. Whether you require comprehensive communications testing, or an off-the-shelf solution that enables communications testing at scale – we have you covered.

Download our spec sheets to find out more about our new offers.

• Consumer Duty Communications Testing Framework (full testing framework)
• Savanta Fundamentals package (an off-the-shelf solution for testing at scale)

More from the series:

This is the latest article in our series – ‘Navigating Consumer Duty: a Savanta series’, which aims to help financial services professionals prepare for the new FCA regulations coming into effect this year. We provide guidance and advice to help your business plan, test and evidence compliance to meet the new standards.

To access more articles from the series, click the links below:

• Navigating Consumer Duty: optimising communication testing
• Navigating Consumer Duty: qualitative or quantitative – what is the right approach?
• Navigating Consumer Duty: do you speak finance?
• Consumer Duty: everything you need to know

Download the Consumer Duty Communications Testing Framework by completing the below form: