For Immediate Release: 03/09/2024, London, UK.

The new service is designed to help financial services firms leverage the power of existing customer panels through a structured insight framework to meet Consumer Duty obligations.

FlexMR have created a brand-new service to help financial services clients adhere to the new UK Consumer Duty regulations. The Consumer Duty Programme has been designed to help financial services firms meet their new obligations with ease, setting out a looped structure and a three-tiered cadence of work that helps firms act to deliver good outcomes for their retail customers: Test, Refine, Learn.

The Financial Conduct Authority have published their final rules and regulations for Consumer Duty, setting new higher and clearer standards of consumer protection and requires firms within the Financial services Industry to put their customers’ needs first. FlexMR’s Consumer Duty Programme uses popular market research methods, tools and tactics to help financial services clients to easily commune with customers and consumers and test their marketing, communications and operational collateral for optimum understanding.

FlexMR Client Relationship Manager, Charlotte Duff, comments, “We have worked hard to thoroughly understand the new responsibilities placed on firms in the Financial Sector, and designed our Consumer Duty Programme to make this new research as easy as possible. We have identified the best research tools, tactics and methodologies that will connect clients to their customers and consumers and deliver the insights needed. Our ‘Test, Refine, Learn’ loop structure is crucial to delivering good outcomes for customers, and is provides a simple, impactful process for our clients to follow in their pursuit of Consumer Duty.“

The three-tier cadence of work this programme promotes is:

• Test – Continuous research testing communications and customer-facing copy is crucial to ensuring customer understanding and staying compliant with Consumer Duty responsibilities.
• Refine – These are regularly scheduled elements such as service/product/comms reviews, taking the outcome data from the ‘Test’ stage to refine any collateral that doesn’t meet the new standards.
• Learn – deeper annual or semi-annual investigations to maintain business-wide alignment on what constitutes “good” consumer understanding, and which elements need more focus.

FlexMR CMO, Chris Martin, adds, “Research and insight is critical to meeting Consumer Duty obligations. But more than that, our structured framework provides financial services brands a way to integrate learnings into core business operations. The programme is designed to both leverage the benefits of an existing customer panel, and ensure insight is elevated from tactical feedback to strategic asset.”

As a part of the Consumer Duty Programme launch, FlexMR has created a free accompanying Consumer Duty Toolkit. This can be used alongside FlexMR’s Consumer Duty Programme or embedded into other Consumer Duty programmes to help guide the Financial Sector towards success.

About FlexMR

FlexMR is the Insights Empowerment Company. The hybrid consumer insights agency and cloud platform provider develops thriving insight communities that streamline online research and enable customer-centric decision making. Since launching the InsightHub platform, FlexMR have connected UK marketing, research and product teams to 300,000+ customers across the globe. Today, the platform supports robust data collection, analysis and activation workflows to empower informed decisions at the speed of business.