Thinking beyond the FCA’s new Consumer Duty

The paper proposes that we need to look beyond just the fairness of how we serve them, but step into their shoes and understand better what their outcomes look like from their perspective.

In essence, it raises the bar from ‘treating customers fairly’ to ‘treating customers well.’ That is a subtle, but significant, distinction.

And it deepens our definition of customer outcomes with guidance and rules that cover a range of elements, including communications, products & services, service, and price & value.

While it does raise some challenges for the industry and there are certainly points of detail we will want to debate, it’s difficult to argue against a principle that is intuitively right. And one which could help us transition to a sector that is more widely trusted by customers. Customers who rely on our help to improve their financial resilience to face the many challenges life poses.

In short, we should embrace the new Consumer Duty; think of it less as a challenge and more as an opportunity.

But our pursuit of improving customer outcomes could be extended even further.

The argument for responsible investment and, particularly, the fight against climate change has never been stronger. A huge amount of work has been done to embed net zero carbon commitments and there is a step change in the work now underway to deliver on all of those.

What we perhaps haven’t done is consider what that really means for customer outcomes.

Put simply, if I saved all my life in a suitable pension product with good service, good returns and some timely guidance and advice then I may on the face of it have a very good retirement outcome; a decent pension pot and plenty of options to fund my later years.

But if my house floods every year due to ever deteriorating weather conditions, or the city I live in is so polluted I can’t venture outside, then it won’t be a great outcome at all.

Given that people’s savings can be invested in ways that will help avert those problems, we must consider our responsibility not just to the product we offer but our contribution to the environment people will live in when they reach retirement.

In summary, we should extend the definition of good customer outcomes to include both elements; the product and the environment. Only then will we have a more complete picture of our duty to consumers, and a chance to truly improve their overall standard of living in retirement.