The FCA’s Consumer Duty came into force in July 2023. It is now in its enforcement phase. The regulator reviewed board reports from 180 firms in 2025 and published its findings. The consistent pattern it identified was firms producing compliance documents without producing compliance evidence. The FCA wants data, measurement, and documented outcomes. Not assertions.
For marketing teams, this matters in a direct and practical way. Three of the four Consumer Duty outcomes sit squarely in the territory of marketing: what you communicate, how you price and present value, and how you support customers through their journey. If your marketing cannot demonstrate good outcomes against those three areas, it is not Consumer Duty compliant regardless of how careful the legal review was before publication.
The Four Outcomes and What They Mean in Practice
Products and Services
Products and services must be designed to meet the genuine needs of the identified target market.
For marketing, this means that the audience you are targeting and the channel you are using to reach them must match the product’s intended purpose.
Marketing a complex investment product to an audience outside the target market isn’t just poor strategy. It’s a Consumer Duty failure.
It also means that your marketing cannot create demand for a product in a segment it was not designed to serve, even if that segment would generate short-term revenue.
Price and Value
This is where the FCA’s 2026 enforcement focus has been sharpest.
The regulator has been explicit in that the explanation of “we benchmarked against the market” is no longer a sufficient answer on fair value. Boards must provide evidence of value at the product range level with specific data on consumer outcomes, not just competitive positioning.
For marketing, this means that value claims must be substantiated. This means that campaigns leaning on phrases like “market-leading rates,” “best value for your money,” and similar phrases are not compliant unless supported by evidence that can withstand FCA scrutiny. The days of promotional language that gestures at value without evidencing it are over in regulated financial services.
Consumer Understanding
This is the outcome that most directly governs marketing communications and the one where the FCA has been most explicit about what it expects.
The Consumer Duty does not ask whether your communications were sent. It asks whether customers understood them. The FCA published its review of consumer understanding outcomes on 13 March 2026 and stated plainly that firms relying on sales data or the absence of complaints have no reliable assurance of understanding.
The regulator specifically identified weak evidence of communication testing as a leading area for improvement.
In practice, this means structured comprehension testing is now a recurring obligation for any agency producing marketing communications to retail customers and not a one-off project. Every significant communication should have evidence that it was tested with real customers from the target market, that comprehension was measured, and that failures were remediated.
This is a material change to the standard that marketing copy must meet. It is not enough for the legal team to confirm that a communication is technically accurate. The marketing team must be able to evidence that consumers in the target market can understand it and make informed decisions from it.
Customer Support
Customers must be able to get the help they need throughout the product lifecycle. For marketing, this outcome has implications for how products are described. If your marketing creates expectations about the support experience that the actual service does not deliver, that is a Consumer Duty gap. It also has implications for how vulnerable customers are identified and served in the marketing and onboarding journey.
Where Most Financial Services Marketing Falls Short
The FCA’s cross-cutting supervisory reviews in 2025 and 2026 identified consistent gaps. Most of them are marketing problems, not compliance problems.
For example, communications that are technically accurate but not demonstrably understandable. The difference here between a legal review and a comprehension test is significant.
A legal review answers the question “is this correct?” Comprehension testing answers the question: can a retail customer in our target market understand this and make a good decision from it? Consumer Duty requires the second, not just the first.
Value claims without evidence. Generic claims about market-leading pricing, strong returns, or superior service exist in marketing across the sector. None of them are Consumer Duty compliant without supporting data that a firm can produce when the FCA asks for it.
Customer journeys that create friction at exactly the wrong moments. If your marketing creates a strong conversion incentive that then collides with a complicated sign-up process, a confusing product description, or a difficult switching journey, that friction is in scope for Consumer Duty. The FCA has been explicit that it will assess whether customer journey design adequately anticipates customer needs.
Board reports that describe activity rather than evidence outcomes. Reports describing what firms have done are not sufficient. They need to supply evidence of what outcomes those actions produced for consumers, and analysis that draws conclusions rather than presenting dashboards.
What This Means for Your Marketing Operation
Consumer Duty compliance is not a legal sign-off step at the end of a production process. It is a design requirement that shapes the brief. If your marketing operation treats it as the former, you are producing communications that are likely to have compliance gaps and creating the kind of evidence deficit that the FCA has already identified as a widespread problem.
The marketing operations that are managing this well have built compliance into how work is briefed, produced, tested, and evidenced. Not as a separate track but as part of how marketing is done. That requires genuine understanding of the regulatory framework on the part of the marketing team, not just the legal team.
It also requires a different kind of relationship with compliance: one where compliance expertise shapes the creative direction rather than reviewing the output.
This is precisely where specialist sector experience in a marketing partner becomes valuable rather than optional. An agency that understands Consumer Duty well enough to brief content correctly from the start is doing something meaningfully different from one that produces content and passes it to your legal team.
