What Are Consumer Duty AI Tools?
As the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) tightens its regulatory focus on Consumer Duty, financial firms are under pressure to prove that they’re delivering “good outcomes” for retail clients. According to the FCA, "Consumer Duty sets higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services and requires firms to put their customers' needs first." Consumer Duty AI tools are software platforms that use artificial intelligence to help firms monitor, assess, and improve their compliance with these obligations — especially across digital communication channels, QA workflows, and customer journeys. Sedric is in this class of AI tools.
These tools provide a proactive, scalable, and real-time approach to compliance, going beyond tick-box assessments to drive measurable improvements in customer experience and regulatory alignment.
Why AI Matters for Consumer Duty Compliance
Traditional compliance methods often rely on:
- Manual reviews of customer interactions
- Post-event audits
- Static checklists and slow feedback loops
This is no longer sufficient.
AI tools can:
- Monitor 100% of customer interactions across channels (voice, chat, email, etc.).
- Identify potential harms in real-time (e.g., poor advice, misleading language, or unfair practices).
- Alert supervisors immediately when Consumer Duty breaches or risks emerge.
- Track performance against all four FCA outcomes: Products and Services, Price and Value, Consumer Understanding, and Consumer Support.
Key Capabilities to Look for in Consumer Duty AI Tools
When evaluating AI-powered compliance platforms, firms should prioritize the following capabilities:
1. Real-Time Monitoring
AI tools like Sedric use natural language processing (NLP) to automatically analyze every customer interaction for potential Consumer Duty risks.
2. Customizable Risk Models
Your firm’s interpretation of Consumer Duty may evolve. The tool should let you tailor risk flags, scorecards, and thresholds.
3. Outcome-Based Reporting
The FCA expects ongoing measurement. Choose platforms that help you track and visualize your compliance with each of the four Consumer Duty outcomes.
4. Scalable Quality Assurance
Instead of sampling 2–5% of interactions, AI lets you QA everything, increasing accuracy and transparency.
5. Audit-Readiness
Ensure the platform creates a clear audit trail — critical for demonstrating compliance during FCA reviews or internal governance assessments.
Use Case: How AI Helped a UK WealthTech Stay Ahead of Consumer Duty
A leading UK digital wealth platform used Sedric’s AI-driven compliance engine to:
- Detect high-risk sales calls where customers were misled about product fees.
- Coach agents in real-time, reducing repeat infractions by 42% in 60 days.
- Generate automated reports mapping customer interactions to FCA outcome metrics.
The firm reported increased confidence going into Consumer Duty board reviews — and a measurable improvement in customer satisfaction scores.
How to Get Started with Consumer Duty AI Tools
Here’s a simple roadmap:
- Assess your current QA and monitoring process.
- Identify high-risk touchpoints (sales calls, chatbot conversations, claims handling, etc.).
- Pilot an AI compliance platform in one business unit or product line.
- Define success metrics (e.g., QA coverage, risk reduction, CX improvement).
- Roll out across teams once proof of value is established.
Final Thoughts
Consumer Duty is not a one-off deadline — it’s a mindset shift. Financial services firms that embrace AI-driven compliance will be better positioned to manage regulatory scrutiny, safeguard customers, and drive trust.
Consumer Duty AI tools are no longer optional — they’re essential.
Speak with Sedric to learn more about how we are helping other FCA regulated UK firms comply with Consumer Duty.
“Training and monitoring of consumer-facing employees will be critical to ensure that an organization is compliant. Technology will support and help the credit and collections industry meet demanding obligations with ease and efficiency, in order to produce the outcomes a regulator wants to see.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
“Our challenge going forward is to position our industry and our companies as desirable places to work. We must implement diversity, equity and inclusion in our workplaces, and get the word out that we have changed. Ask your newest employees for feedback—what would make our workplace desirable for their friends and acquaintances? In this post-pandemic world, getting people to crawl out of their comfortable cocoons may be difficult, but it can be done!”
CACi
“In the last few years, the buzz of the call centers faded away. Now that many people still have the opportunity to continue to work from home, performance directors need to pivot their focus. We need to ensure that the training is effective in this new environment. The move is from hours in a classroom setting to immediate, personalized micro-learning units that enforce the corrective behaviors.”
Resurgent Capital
“The digital collections movement continues to be in full steam and we are excited to see all of the new technologies that are coming into the ARM industry to help drive enhanced collection performance in a compliant manner. We anticipate additional M&A consolidation globally in the ARM industry, as more digital ARM companies look to accelerate market entry and obtain blue-chip clients and deploy digital-first solutions.”
“Digitization will be critically accelerated in 2023. Recovery organizations may be required to furnish consumers’ account data through consumer-selected platforms that will likely be different from organizations’ traditional payment portals. Organizations should start preparing their technology and operations for that contingency now to harness the trend to their benefit.”
Kredit
“Data is the new oil, and extracting data from all sources, especially voice, will be a must-have in 2023. We are in the age of machine learning, and ML runs on data. Getting ALL the data and getting it into one place for the ML to do what it can are the key differences between organizations that will make it and those that don't.”
Indebted
“In 2023, collectors and creditors will be required to work closer together. Reg F oversight requirements have created a new reality of shared compliance responsibility. Servicers and creditors can better collaborate by using new data-driven compliance platforms that provide all parties with critical insights and generate the transparency and trust needed to succeed in a tightening regulatory climate.”
As Gen Z enters the workforce, you’ll have up to four generations in your agency. Everyone learns differently. Young people learn from TikTok videos, and there is a professional term for this: micro-learning. Such short videos are especially efficient when sent out close to the time when the violation occurred.
Barron & Newburger
The most efficient training systems I’ve seen are those which build surgical, data-driven compliance content and provide agents the exact training they need when they most need it. This approach avoids wasting time and money on training which does not address the need. Continuous, role-based training programs that focus on the needs of each individual agent are some of the most efficient and effective I’ve seen.
Bedard Law Group
“Training is only going to be effective if it's done at or near the time the violation occurred. As agents handle hundreds of calls a week they will not have the capacity to remember particular moments of each consumer interaction. Therefore, effective monitoring will be critical to address the deficiency when it happens, in order to remediate quickly so that it does not become a systemic problem going forward.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
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