Meeting Consumer Duty standards means more than compliance. It requires rethinking customer journeys so they deliver fair outcomes, reduce risk, and create business value. For many firms, this becomes critical when products and services evolve. Whether that's through digital transformation, new distribution channels, or redesigned onboarding journeys, every change introduces the question: Does this stand up to Consumer Duty expectations?
Common Challenges
At Sorai, we often find that firms struggle to adapt their journeys to meet the Consumer Duty standards for a few common reasons:
-
Journeys are developed with a strong technical perspective, defining customer tasks and operations over the customer experience
-
They don’t utilise customer data and qualitative insights, which brings to life what the customer wants and expects from their products
-
They don’t consider how data is used, understood and shared by customers throughout to indicate trust, transparency and risk management
To address these challenges, firms need to build journeys that connect consumer needs, data, and measurement in a more deliberate way. Customer needs and gaps should be mapped across the product lifecycle, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative insights to show a clear understanding of behaviours and expectations.
At the same time, journeys must reflect how data is used, shared, and understood by customers, linking transparency, trust, and risk management directly to the experience.
Every journey should embed a measurement framework that tracks outcomes end-to-end, ensuring alignment with Consumer Duty standards and enabling firms to manage risk effectively over time.
Our Solution
We take a tailored sprint approach. Our three-week sprint analyses and assesses a core end-to-end customer journey and develops it to meet Consumer Duty standards:
Diagnose
Action: We'll analyse an existing customer journey and collide it with customer data and qualitative research to determine the unmet needs and gaps.
Outcome: A draft of the present end-to-end customer journey with key gaps identified to meet Consumer Duty standards.
Validate
Action: Determine an evolved customer journey with a focus on needs, risk management, and data flow. Test and validate these for robustness.
Outcome: A set of core consumer insights, including needs, gaps, opportunities and expectations, and an updated draft of the end-to-end customer journey.
Develop
Action: Design the customer journey and develop key initiatives that need to be undertaken in order to deliver on Consumer Duty standards.
Outcome: An updated ideal state end-to-end customer journey aligned to Consumer Duty standards, including a list of recommendations and initiatives across product, tech, risk and data.
This sprint model is underpinned by:
-
Deep sector experience – Our team has designed and led journey and service blueprinting in financial services for decades.
-
Proven methodologies – We apply tested templates and blueprint frameworks from day one to accelerate delivery.
-
Customer involvement – We work with trusted partners to recruit the right customers for qualitative research, ensuring every journey reflects real expectations.
-
Regulatory oversight – Our Consumer Duty specialist ensures every stage aligns to FCA expectations and stands up to scrutiny.
If you’re rethinking your customer journeys, our team would be glad to chat. Let us know what you're working on by filling out the form below, and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
