The next phase of Consumer Duty: what the FCA’s enforcement push means for your marketing

The implementation phase is over. The scrutiny phase has begun.

The FCA has moved from telling firms what it expects to checking whether they’re delivering, and it’s changing the game for financial services marketers.

What’s changed?

If you work in financial services marketing, the last two years have been dominated by Consumer Duty: workshops, sign-off processes, and conversations about whether a headline is ‘clear, fair and not misleading’.

That phase is done. The question has shifted from “have we implemented the Duty?” to “can we prove our communications are delivering good outcomes, and what happens if we can’t?”

The FCA is no longer asking nicely

In January 2026, the FCA launched its first Enforcement Watch newsletter, opening a public window into its active caseload. Six live Consumer Duty investigations, with fair value failures in the insurance sector flagged among the most serious. Nationwide was fined £44 million in December 2025 for weaknesses in systems and controls. Monzo was fined £21 million in July 2025.

These are household names being penalised, and the direction of travel is becoming hard to miss.

It’s also worth understanding how the FCA is operating. They’re using supervision, not just formal enforcement, to secure outcomes faster. Firm-specific remediation requirements can be imposed without opening a full investigation. So problems in your customer communications or journey design can trigger regulatory action well before anything reaches a tribunal.

Why this lands on marketing

The FCA’s priorities include four cross-cutting multi-firm reviews. Two of them sit squarely on your desk: how firms design and deliver customer journeys, with a specific focus on unnecessary friction, and whether firms’ communications help consumers make informed decisions.

That second one rewards a closer look. The question isn’t really whether your comms are compliant in the conventional sense. It’s whether they work, in the sense of producing customers who understand what they’ve bought.

Most teams are reasonably good at the basics: disclaimers, risk warnings, legal sign-off. The FCA’s consumer understanding outcome goes further. They’re looking for evidence that customers comprehend what they’re being told, not just that the information was technically present.

In practice, that means:

• Prominence. Key information needs to appear at the right moment in the journey, not buried in a 70-page PDF.
• Accessibility. Is the language right for your actual audience, not just free of factual error?
• Understanding. Campaign landing pages, onboarding emails, the whole estate needs to be checked for comprehension, not just signed off by legal.

What this looks like in practice

Comprehension testing has to become part of how campaigns get built rather than something bolted on afterwards. That means user testing on key communications, A/B tests that measure understanding rather than only click-through rates, and feedback loops that capture whether customers can explain what they’ve been told.

For most teams, that’s a shift in how the function operates, but it’s the direction the regulator is heading.

The FCA expects fair value to be demonstrated across the full customer experience, including how value is communicated and whether promotional materials reflect what the customer receives.

Some uncomfortable questions follow from this

Are your campaigns leading with headline features that obscure the limitations? Are they targeting the right segments, or optimising for volume because volume is easier to measure? When a rate changes or a product is withdrawn, how quickly does the marketing estate reflect that, across every channel, every landing page, every piece of collateral?

If marketing is contributing to a gap between what customers expect and what they experience, that’s your problem as much as the product team’s.

The opportunity most firms are missing

Something gets lost in the compliance anxiety: the FCA is actively simplifying regulation.

In March 2025, they published an action plan to simplify savings account communications and review credit advertising rules, including those terms and conditions nobody reads. Legacy disclosure rules that conflict with the Duty’s consumer understanding outcome are being reformed. Several consultations are planned for 2026, covering retail disclosures, credit advertising and mortgage rules.

Firms that engage with these consultations can help shape more flexible, customer-focused standards. It’s tempting to leave that to legal, but marketing has more to contribute than it tends to assume.

Where firms keep coming unstuck

Compliance bolted on at the end. Marketing builds the campaign, compliance pushes back, and the result satisfies neither side. Getting compliance involved at the briefing stage, with pre-approved messaging frameworks and compliant-by-design templates, is faster, produces better work, and is far easier to evidence.

An ungovernable digital estate. Every campaign microsite, landing page and PDF that contains a financial promotion needs to be accurate, current and compliant. If you can’t produce a complete inventory of your live marketing assets and confirm they’re up to date, that’s the gap the FCA’s multi-firm reviews are designed to find.

What to do now

Audit for comprehension, not just accuracy. Can a typical customer explain what your product does, what it costs and what the limitations are? Bear in mind the average UK adult reads at a Year 5 to 6 level.

Build compliance into the front of the process. Pre-approved frameworks and early involvement save more time than the review-and-revise cycle most teams are stuck in.

Evolve your measurement. Add comprehension and outcome metrics alongside the performance data you already track.

Get your digital estate under control. If you don’t know what’s live, you can’t manage it.

The firms that move now will compound the advantage

The Consumer Duty isn’t going away. The FCA’s 2025 to 2030 strategy confirms it as the centrepiece of regulation going forward. Firms that get good at this won’t just be compliant, they’ll be harder to compete with.

Creode works exclusively with financial services organisations, helping marketing teams build campaigns, platforms and processes that are compliant by design. If you’re rethinking how your marketing function operates under the Duty, we should talk.