Meeting Your Duty under Consumer Duty: How Surveillance Can Help

Blog Post by Osvaldo Berrios on 27 May 2022 in category Regulations

Coming in July 2023, Consumer Duty will be the most significant UK regulatory overhaul of the past decade. More than simply regulating firms, the FCA’s Consumer Duty is a cultural reset. It places the onus on firms to prioritize and deliver good outcomes to retail consumers, provide evidence of these positive outcomes, and intervene and act when expectations aren’t met.

Consumer Duty consists of three key elements:

  1. The Consumer Principle which is intended to drive conduct and culture and defines standards of behavior that the FCA expects from firms.
  2. Cross-cutting rules which establish overarching expectations about how regulated firms and employees should conduct themselves as they interact with retail consumers.
  3. The four outcomes that the FCA expects firms to deliver, in terms of communications, products and services, customer service, and prices of products and services.

Through the support of the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR), Consumer Duty affirms the obligation of UK financial services firms to put consumers’ interests first and makes it clear that senior managers will be held accountable when this doesn’t happen.

At the end of the day, this means firms must put appropriate and robust systems and controls in place. Here are seven things to look for as you upgrade your surveillance (and recording) capabilities. Look for:

  1. Omni-channel recording and surveillance that works with all of the different communication modalities and devices your regulated employees use
  2. A surveillance solution powered by artificial intelligence (for example, Natural Language Processing)
  3. A surveillance solution that incorporates proven out-of-the box (OOTB) analytical models from day one
  4. A surveillance solution with self-development analytics capabilities built in
  5. A solution that’s open to ingest all of the data necessary for Consumer Duty surveillance
  6. A holistic solution that can analyze and link alerts and data across systems
  7. A surveillance solution with flexible reporting dashboards and data visualization tools

See more information on

FCA’s Consumer DutySURVEIL-X Holistic SurveillanceSM&CR RegulationSurveillance for Wealth ManagementTrading Regulations