Skip to main content

Putting Customers First: How to Meet the FCA’s Consumer Duty with Confidence

By April 25, 2025Insights

Since the Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty came into force, firms across the financial services sector must positively drive the delivery of good outcomes for their retail customers, whilst being able to provide evidence of success in this area.

The four outcomes to which firms must commit cover key areas in the customer relationship:

  • Products & Services

Must be designed to meet genuine customer needs and only be distributed to relevant customers.

  • Price and Value

Price of products and services must be clear and transparent and offer good value for money

  • Consumer Understanding

Customers must always be given the information they need, at the right time, and in a clear and understandable format.

  • Consumer Support

Firms should enable consumers to realise the benefits of the products and services they buy whilst pursuing their individual financial objectives, and able to act in their own interests.

The Consumer Duty also includes three Cross-Cutting Rules which state that companies must:

  • Act in good faith towards retail customers
  • Avoid causing foreseeable harm to retail customers
  • Enable and support retail customers to pursue their financial objectives

The absolute expectation is for brands and services to put the customer experience at the centre of their operations. CGA has a disciplined team of CX experts that can help and guide you, working closely together to ensure that you are able to demonstrate to both customers and the FCA your commitment to customer-centricity.

Mapping your customer journey

Heartbeat®, our proprietary journey mapping methodology, allows you to understand what’s important to each of your customers at every step of the customer journey and to measure how well you meet these expectations. The results clearly identify where you need to focus your future attention, budget, resource, and technology to ensure they get the products, services and support they need.

Let’s assess your capabilities

The Duty also requires companies to ensure that the interests of their customers are central to the culture of the business and totally embedded throughout the organisation. This can present a challenge to financial businesses if they lack the structure, processes and resource needed to respond in the right way, at the right time. The overall level of Customer Experience (CX) maturity often needs to improve if they are going to meet the requirements of the Duty. We can measure your current CX maturity against business-critical parameters through another CGA propriety tool – CompassTM, allowing you to scope your current capabilities, performance and areas for improvement.

This is an essential step to implement before embarking on any change programme and quickly identifies future improvement opportunities and where ‘quick wins’ can be gained.

The cross-cutting rules

Responsibility is on companies to comply with Consumer Duty by always ensuring that they put their customers first and provide them with a positive experience. Talk to CGA about how to deliver these positive experiences, through insight, measurement, engagement and customer-centric transformation making your company future fit for your customers today and tomorrow.