What Consumer Duty asks of ongoing suitability

Consumer Duty is sometimes discussed as though it invented the requirement to act in a client's interest. It did not. Advisers were already obliged to ensure ongoing suitability. What the Duty changed is subtler, and for many firms more demanding: it raised the expectation that a firm can demonstrate, on a continuing basis, that the service a client pays for is being delivered and still fits their circumstances.

From doing to demonstrating

The shift from doing the right thing to being able to show it is not cosmetic. Evidence has to be captured consistently, retained, and retrievable, and it has to cover not just the recommendation but whether the client understood it and whether the ongoing service was actually provided. A firm that has always done good work but recorded it loosely can find itself unable to prove what it knows to be true.

That pressure falls hardest on firms whose records live in places never designed to be queried: email threads, meeting notes, documents named by whoever saved them. The information usually exists. Reconstructing a consistent picture of ongoing service across an entire book, on demand, is what proves difficult. This is less a technology question than a question of discipline, though technology plainly bears on how painful that discipline is to maintain.

It is worth being clear-eyed about what the Duty does and does not require. It does not dictate that every firm adopt the same tools or the same process. It asks that whatever a firm does, it can stand behind with evidence. Firms that start from that principle, rather than from a checklist, tend to make more sensible decisions about how much actually needs to change.

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