Consumer Duty Regulations – What they are doing at HSB
Authored by HSB
On 27 July 2022, the FCA published its final rules and guidance relating to the introduction of the new Consumer Duty regulations, which sets clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services.
The Consumer Duty introduces a new Principle (Principle 12), which requires that “a firm must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers”. The principle is supported by three cross-cutting rules (applicable to all areas of conduct) requiring firms to:
act in good faith towards retail customers
avoid causing foreseeable harm to retail customersenable and support retail customers to pursue their financial objectives
The rules are also intended to inform and help put customers’ needs first; ensuring they are considered at every stage of the insurance process. These good customer outcomes relate to four key areas:
Products and services
Price and valueConsumer understandingConsumer support
The four outcomes represent key elements of the relationship between a firm and its customer, and provide us with a suite of rules and guidance to enable us (as a firm) to meet consumers’ financial and wellbeing needs.
At HSB, we’ve been working to meet the FCA’s requirements and implementation timetable. So what have we been doing?
It is important to HSB that we embed the duty across our strategy, business objectives and wider culture of the company, and are on track for compliance with the Consumer Duty by 31 July 2023.
We’ve undertaken a detailed gap analysis across all business areas, and an implementation plan has been put in place to ensure we meet the deadlines given by the FCA and further support our compliance with the new duty.
We’ve appointed a Consumer Duty Champion at Board level to ensure that delivering good customer outcomes is integral at every level of HSB. And we are ensuring our employees have the appropriate training to understand the customer journey, and how to deliver good customer outcomes.
As part of the FCA Pricing Practices Regulations, we’ve already implemented PROD 4 into our business, with fair value assessments in place for our products. We’re now using these assessments and enhancing the process to consider the good customer outcomes we’ve identified as important. We will continue to engage with other parties in the distribution chain to meet the requirements of the duty and better understand how the products we distribute are providing fair value to customers.
Please do contact us if you have any queries regarding our Consumer Duty activity by leaving a message here
