From my perspective, Consumer Duty has changed what good client communication looks like — and it changed faster than most chartered practices could adapt. Plain language, fair value, suitability rationale, comprehension check — all now need to be evidenced, not just intended. Specially in chartered wealth practices, month-end Consumer Duty reviews have become a reconstruction exercise because the evidence is scattered.
I believe Ai tooling can solve this by auto-attaching Consumer Duty metadata to every client communication as it’s drafted. Not as an extra step — as part of the drafting itself.
What Consumer Duty actually requires
Four outcomes, as the FCA frames them. Products and services that meet customer needs. Price and value that’s fair. Consumer understanding — communications that clients actually comprehend. Consumer support that meets needs over the product lifetime.
For wealth planners, the most relevant outcome is consumer understanding. Every client communication — annual review letters, suitability addenda, fee statements, product information — needs to be drafted in language the specific client can understand, and there should be a comprehension mechanism.
How Ai supports this
Specially in governed wealth-planning tools, Ai can score a draft against plain-language standards as it’s written. Flesch reading ease, sentence length, jargon density, passive voice frequency — all scored automatically. The planner sees the score, adjusts, sends. The score and the draft versions are logged to the audit chain.
Apart from this, the Ai can attach fair-value evidence, suitability rationale and comprehension-check metadata to every letter. Your Consumer Duty Champion at month-end filters by metric — “show me all letters with plain-language score below 60” — rather than re-reading 200 letters.
Per-client vault isolation
The Ai working on the Hargreaves file should not, structurally, be able to retrieve the Montgomery file. Specially for high-net-worth clients, where the inter-client sensitivity is real. Per-client vaults enforce this at the retrieval layer. Not a policy. Software.
I believe this is under-appreciated by practices that haven’t moved to governed Ai yet. Manual drafting doesn’t have this risk — planners aren’t cross-referencing clients mentally. Ai drafting in a non-isolated tool does — the Ai can in principle draw on multiple clients unless the tool structurally prevents it.
SYSC 9 plus Consumer Duty
Apart from this, Consumer Duty sits alongside SYSC 9 record-keeping. The audit chain from governed Ai tooling satisfies both at once — every Ai-assisted communication has input data, output, sign-off, and Consumer Duty metadata attached. We’ve written separately on SYSC 9 and Ai record-keeping.
Other Me for wealth managers
Other Me is built for chartered wealth practices specifically. Per-client vault isolation, Consumer Duty metadata auto-attached to every communication, plain-language scoring built into the drafting experience. Workflow on the Wealth Managers solution page. Start a free 7-day trial, no credit card and draft one real client-review letter in it this week.