Since July 2023, the FCA has expected every retail firm to deliver good outcomes for customers. Two years in, the regulator has been clear about what it will do when those outcomes do not materialise, and what it expects firms to be able to show in defence.
What the rule actually requires
The Consumer Duty (PRIN 2A in the FCA Handbook) sets out a Consumer Principle: firms must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers. Beneath that sit three cross-cutting rules, act in good faith, avoid causing foreseeable harm, and enable customers to pursue their financial objectives, and four specific outcomes:
- Products and services that meet customer needs.
- Price and value that is fair.
- Consumer understanding (clear, honest communications).
- Consumer support (customers can use products as expected, and get help when they cannot).
Every firm in the retail distribution chain, manufacturer, distributor, broker, has to evidence that those four outcomes hold for their customers, and that vulnerable customers in particular are not disadvantaged.
What happens if you do not comply
The FCA's standard enforcement toolkit applies. Under the Financial Services and Markets Act, the regulator can:
- Issue public censure - a published statement that a firm has breached its rules. The reputational fallout typically outweighs any direct financial cost.
- Impose unlimited financial penalties. Recent Consumer Duty-adjacent fines have ranged from low millions into the tens and hundreds of millions, depending on revenue affected.
- Restrict permissions or order a Section 166 skilled person review. A typical s166 costs the firm £200,000 to £2m of mandatory third-party investigation, paid by the firm regardless of what is found.
- Refer individuals for personal sanctions under the Senior Managers and Certification Regime. Accountable executives can face their own fines, prohibitions or banning orders.
The secondary harm is often larger than the primary fine. Withdrawn distribution agreements, increased FOS complaints with binding compensation, media coverage that affects new customer acquisition, and the internal cost of remediation all stack on top.
The evidence problem
The FCA has been explicit: it does not expect perfection, but it does expect firms to demonstrate they have thought systematically about customer outcomes and have evidence to back it up.
That last word is the one most teams underestimate. If a regulator opens an inquiry, the question is not "is your customer journey good?" It is "show us how you know it is good." Most firms struggle here. UX feedback lives in research notes that nobody references after a sprint kickoff. Accessibility audits happen once, generate a PDF, and gather digital dust. Customer support tickets are anecdotes, not data.
Without documented, repeated evidence of the work, "we tried" does not land.
How UXDuty fits in
UXDuty is built around the evidence problem. Every scan produces:
- A timestamped record of what the customer journey looked like on a given date.
- Plain-language identification of issues that disadvantage customers, with a screenshot of where each issue lives.
- A Consumer Duty risk band weighted toward issues that affect vulnerable users.
- A downloadable PDF report regulators or auditors can reference directly.
Each scan is small enough to run weekly on a key journey. The historical record lets you show the regulator: here is the issue we found, here is when we fixed it, here is the scan that confirms the fix held.
Benchmark and validate
The workflow most of our customers settle into:
- Run an initial scan on the journey. This is your baseline.
- Address the issues. Some are quick design fixes, others are content rewrites or larger structural changes.
- Re-scan after the fix. The risk band should drop. Specific issues should drop off the list.
- Schedule recurring scans (weekly or monthly) to catch regressions before customers do.
This is the cycle the FCA has signalled it expects to see. Not a one-time audit, but a continuous loop with a defensible paper trail.
Note
Scans can be duplicated for benchmark-and-validate workflows: set a baseline, fix what matters, re-scan to confirm. Because UXDuty uses AI to review each page, expect small variance between runs; the reliable signal is the trend, not exact issue counts.
The bottom line
Consumer Duty is not going to be repealed, and enforcement is intensifying as the FCA collects more outcomes data from supervised firms. Firms that wait to be told what is wrong will spend a lot more later, both on the remediation and on the regulatory cost. Firms that build evidence into the build cycle will have an answer ready when the question comes.
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