How Consumer Duty compliance is changing client communications

How is Consumer Duty compliance affecting client communications?

Consumer Duty is rapidly changing the way Financial Services businesses communicate with clients. It is also causing consumers to re-evaluate the value of advice they receive from financial service advisers, and how financial institutions segment clients and offer relevant products and services.

On 30 April 2023, the UK adopted the new Consumer Duty obligations, and financial service providers and firms concluded their review of their existing open products. The changes that Consumer Duty brings impacts the way financial service providers interact with new and existing clients. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to ensure that you and your business are equipped with rich, actionable insights into your customers, to help you understand where to focus your Consumer Duty activities to ensure compliance.

What are the most impactful challenges currently resulting from Consumer Duty compliance?

• Solidifying customer communications. You must show that the essential steps to understand customers’ needs and improve communications are being taken to remain compliant.
• Identifying and supporting vulnerable customers. Vulnerability indicators change over time, therefore, without adequate customer knowledge, determining the diverse needs of your customers will be difficult.
• Lack of strategy for maintaining and nurturing customer relationships over their policy, resulting from limitations of technical debt and data capabilities.
• Inability to provide relevant offers or leverage existing customers to attract new customers when you do not know who your customers are.
• Future proofing your business becomes compromised without the insights to initiate transformational change. Your brand will need to remain relevant for customers and adhere to their customer experience expectations.

The steps CACI takes to make a difference for your business

We support Consumer Duty compliance across several key requirements, including:

• Supplying support beyond the strategy – understanding customers and improving communications.
• Developing a testing process to help you understand your customers and find areas for improvement.
• Accelerating Consumer Duty delivery and showing progress through an innate understanding of your customers’ diverse needs.
• Providing a comprehensive view of all customer communications, assessed for suitability against Consumer Duty and amended as needed.
• Scoring and evaluating your performance against key Consumer Duty metrics.
• Bringing in all channels to support customers.

Our process guarantees that you will be solving Consumer Duty compliance issues as they arise to secure a successful future for your business. We break this down into four steps:

1. Audit:

We work with you to gain an understanding of your existing communications, technical capabilities and data available, for communications improvements to be made effectively.

2. Campaign strategy, testing & delivery:

We then identify initial tests to show iterative improvement and implementation of the defined methods of communication that will meet Consumer Duty standards.

3. Customer strategy:

We create robust segmentation to define where there is headroom opportunity and who your priority audiences are. We also define the customer journey to activate your segmentation and strategy accordingly.

4. Contact strategies & use cases:

Finally, we develop detailed contact strategies for the execution of your customer journey, and identify technology and data use cases that will inform your future architecture and technology roadmaps.

How CACI ensures your business meets Consumer Duty compliance: real-time example

When one business with a range of financial products that fall under Consumer Duty recognised that they did not have an established amount of internal experience, they approached CACI to ensure that Consumer Duty compliance was addressed with each of their products, tailored to the customer audiences they served.

We highlighted several opportunities that the business could leverage through our capabilities, including:

• Understanding the business’ customer base and identifying headroom opportunities to drive growth.
• Creating engagement strategies that would protect and support their customers throughout their relationship.
• Rapidly improving insight led capability by enriching, leveraging and harnessing their potential of customer data.
• Demonstrating the power that a 360° view of the business’ customers and market would have by blending their data with our own to analyse customers, identify opportunities and learn how they could serve customers more compliantly and effectively.

Why you can count on us to support your Consumer Duty compliance initiatives

Our extensive experience with Consumer Duty paired with our unique data capabilities allows us to define market opportunities and key audiences that will deliver immediate growth and engage audiences of the future. We translate rich, quantified insights into actionable strategies to deliver targeted, personalised and omnichannel programmes that will guarantee success.

Contact us today to find out how we can support you and your business ahead of the upcoming Consumer Duty deadline.