Consumer Investing: Consumer Duty Teardown #2

Episode transcript

Amelia: Hi, I'm Amelia.

Paul Wood: I'm Paul.

Pat: I'm Pat.

Russ: I'm Russ.

Amelia: And this is Fin the Week. Welcome back. It's nice to be back myself — I've been off on holiday. It was quite nice listening to the last episode by the pool, made a nice change.

Paul Wood: Yeah, I can imagine. Hopefully we didn't mess it up too much without you there.

Amelia: No, it all sounded fine.

Pat: I'd quite like to sit by the pool listening to an episode.

Russ: I love your commitment to the podcast, Amelia — on a sunbed listening to Fin the Week.

Pat: I'd be laid out in five words, actually.

Paul Wood: Bring you right back down to earth, wouldn't it?

Pat: Yeah, that's us.

Amelia: You've got to be loyal, guys. So, we're three weeks into Consumer Duty Awareness Month, and I did catch up on last week's episode — the first teardown, using Indulge's in-house tool UX Duty, looking at three current accounts. Should we briefly recap the overall findings?

Paul Wood: Yeah, the current accounts one was interesting. What stood out for me was that there were bold promises to entice people into switching, but the highly relevant terms and conditions were hidden in the small print — which felt wrong, really. It felt like it went against the aims of Consumer Duty. That was the main standout for me. I don't know if you two had anything else that stood out.

Pat: I'm pretty much aligned with you, Paul — the important thing was surfacing the key points from the terms and conditions, so customers see more than just the headline promotional elements.

Russ: There was also the lack of signposting to advice, which is now an obligation under Consumer Duty — firms should be looking for the best outcomes for consumers. Accessibility was an issue too — almost every step of the journey was riddled with problems: colour contrast, acronyms not explained correctly or in the right places, assuming people understand terms like APR, which we discussed is actually quite hard to explain. So it was a good debate — the UX Duty findings surfaced a lot of conversation, and there were common themes. They might not be specific issues the FCA would intervene on, but the common themes across digital journeys are things firms should have on their radar, because as it stands they make it genuinely difficult for consumers to understand these products, their costs, and so on. We'll see the same themes rising again today.

Amelia: It'll be interesting to see, because we're going up a level this week — from an everyday financial services product to one most people find pretty intimidating: investing. Three robo-advisors, anonymised. Paul, what's the plan for today?

Paul Wood: We wanted to look at a different type of financial product. Unlike bank switching, which feels fairly non-invasive — something most people can imagine doing, and which is marketed as an easy process — investing is a trickier concept, because it means different things to different people. For some, it conjures images of investment banking and big business, a different world entirely. For others, brands claim to make investing very accessible, and app-based finance has genuinely made it more accessible — signing up for an ISA is a relatively simple thing these days. So it's an area well worth looking into: how do brands present the journey, where are the flaws, and are there findings similar to what we found with bank switching? Spoiler alert: accessibility rears its head again, which raises the question — is anyone taking accessibility seriously enough, or is it a dropped ball across the board?

Pat: And then there's the rise of the armchair investor, using apps like Robinhood, which make the whole process seamless and strip out a lot of the intimidating terminology. That's part of what created the GameStop fiasco — GameStop became massively shorted, the community rallied around it, and the stock price surged even though the business wasn't especially viable. People got passionate about the brand and piled in to drive the price up and get one over on the short sellers. Then there's pump-and-dump crypto, which is huge — if you can work the system cleverly you can make a lot of money, but most people get completely done over and lose thousands, sometimes life savings, on short-term meme-coin investments. It's a really consumer-focused area — what you can do now compares to almost nothing five years ago.

Russ: It's also a space the FCA isn't afraid to move in on. In Enforcement Watch 2 they intervened with a trading platform offering contracts for difference. The publication is clear that it isn't just about price — not just about firms taking a cut on the way in and out of a contract. They specifically said they're looking at unsuitable features that lead to foreseeable harm, or that frustrate a retail client's intended use of the product or service. It's easy to assume price and value as an outcome is just about the price a firm charges and there's not much else you can do about it. But the FCA is moving in on the idea that foreseeable harm can be caused by a platform's features — and that's essentially UX. Are platforms like Robinhood, eToro, or this CFD platform manipulating retail customers into investing more, losing money, investing more, losing money — to the point it's almost impossible to win? And is that interaction done fairly? That's a big shift.

Amelia: So we've got three firms, kept anonymous as always. What's the approach this time?

Paul Wood: We selected three firms representing different parts of the market. Russ, how did you pick them?

Russ: Similar to every teardown — we pick a large provider, a mid-tier firm, and a smaller challenger, which gives us a broad view of the landscape. We're calling them Firm A, Firm B and Firm C, so I'll try not to slip and give away any brand names. I think we nearly did last week.

Amelia: Ha — I'm glad I don't know, so I don't have to worry about it. Shall we jump into the summary of key findings? 150 findings across the three firms — what did that look like?

Russ: A mixture across the different outcomes, as you'd expect. Accessibility is high again — it's scarily easy to find accessibility issues on every big website. It's the forgotten part of designing and building a site, and it falls into the vulnerable-customer category under Consumer Duty. I think it's only a matter of time before conforming to WCAG becomes a higher priority for digital platforms — as it should be, since it's already a legal requirement for the public sector. I'm not sure how these firms get away with it so easily. There are real blockers for screen readers, real blockers for people with low vision, and a lot of plain-language issues too. It'll be interesting to see if the FCA finally moves in on this, since it aligns directly with Consumer Duty.

Paul Wood: The accessibility figure really stands out — 53% of the issues we uncovered were categorised as accessibility issues. It's fascinating: is it that firms don't prioritise it, or almost ignore it because they think it's not important enough? Is it that they run out of resource and have to prioritise elsewhere? Or is there just wiggle room in the guidelines? I'm not an expert, but from working with developers who are much deeper into it, I know there are grey areas in the accessibility guidelines — you apply them a bit like case law, aiming for the best version you can rather than treating it as a checklist. But what's the story behind that 53%?

Pat: My view is there are a couple of things going on. First, it's just not high on the agenda for any of the parties involved. The firm writing the brief probably has "must be WCAG AA compliant" as a line item in the tender requirements, but the team responding to the tender often doesn't really understand what that means or how to test and validate it. Then the designers and developers don't have accessibility front of mind while building. At the end of the process there's a QA check — someone runs an accessibility checker, and lots of things fail. Retrofitting accessibility into an app that's already built is genuinely difficult. To get it right you have to plan for WCAG AA compliance from the start; if you don't, it's very hard to retrofit. That's probably why it fails so commonly. And some brands have had their colours for twenty or thirty years, and the contrast between their brand yellow and green, say, is fundamentally inaccessible — they'd have to step back and review a full rebrand to fix it. So there are a few factors at play. We've learned over the years — from making these mistakes ourselves — that you have to build in accessibility from the start, so we do.

Paul Wood: We often talk about colour contrast because it's an easy, understandable example of accessibility done right or wrong. But there are more technical things too — like building a site you can navigate using only the keyboard. I find that fascinating, because tabbing through a site reveals how the information architecture is built behind the scenes, and how easy or frustrating the service is to use. Some sites immediately offer "skip to main content" when you hit tab; without that, a screen reader might read out every navigation item on every page load. It'd be interesting — and it's probably an open question — to see how many of the issues we uncover across these teardowns are innocuous versus genuine showstoppers like that.

Pat: That tab-order example — writing your HTML so the tab order covers every element in an efficient, orderly way — has to be in a coder's head from the beginning. It's the kind of thing a junior developer, or someone vibe-coding something, or anyone without much HTML experience just isn't thinking about. They're focused on how it looks on mobile and desktop. Without an experienced front-end developer, those accessibility details get dropped — things like highlighting the active component as you tab through: does every element get a visible highlight, or just the default dotted outline, or nothing at all? The devil is in the detail, and it takes experienced developers to get it right.

Russ: I think what you're referring to is missing content landmarks, which came up multiple times in the findings. The simplest way to check is with VoiceOver on a Mac — you might even have triggered it by accident with a keyboard shortcut. Turn it on, tab through the site, and you'll know. It should be part of the QA phase, ideally tested by someone other than the developers who built it. On common issues, I keep coming back to WebAIM as a source — 90% of all errors they find across the web fall into just six categories. It'd be interesting to see whether what we've found aligns: low-contrast text is by far the biggest problem across the web, then missing alt text, missing form input labels, empty links and buttons (which make screen readers almost unusable), and missing document language, which again causes real issues for screen readers. Ninety-six percent of all issues fall into those six categories, plus the odds and ends UX Duty has picked up. It might be worth a dedicated session just on accessibility, pulling out all the issues we've found and seeing how they map onto WebAIM's categories. I'd guess colour contrast is still number one — and it really is remarkable how often firms get that wrong on products where people are investing or moving money.

Paul Wood: Looking at the summary of issues: Firm A had 58, Firm B 29, Firm C 63. On those numbers alone, Firm B looks better — though we don't know what the issues actually were. Remind us — Firm A is the big player, Firm B the mid-tier, Firm C the fintech challenger?

Russ: That's right.

Amelia: And all three ranked as high risk on our Consumer Duty risk bands. Are you surprised by that?

Russ: That's how UX Duty flagged it. It's still a fairly subjective view — part of the scan uses AI, and AI doesn't always get everything right, so it's a qualitative judgement as well. It can be quite a critical eye and flag things as high. I'd take it with a pinch of salt, but there are a lot of issues that don't conform to Consumer Duty rules, and they add up — so you could argue the "high risk" call on the digital journey is fair.

Paul Wood: For anyone who hasn't caught the last couple of episodes — we run these firms' processes through an app we built, UX Duty. We feed in pages representing parts of the user journey, it identifies issues and assigns a risk score. As you say, that's subjective, but it's probably configured to be risk-averse, which is how a compliance team would view things too. In my experience working with marketing and operations teams reporting into compliance, compliance is always risk-averse — so UX Duty flagging something as high risk where you might argue medium is probably how the team would see it as well.

Amelia: Let's talk specifics. How were risk warnings handled?

Russ: This one's easy to spot on any of these sites — a big, shiny headline return ("invest £1,000, be a millionaire in ten years"), and then the small print: your capital is at risk, you might lose everything, which with retail investing is arguably quite likely. You'd like to think with robo-advisors your money is a bit safer, since you're trusting an algorithm with a human in the loop, especially with the bigger brands. But from a consumer-understanding perspective, that's where these journeys break down — firms have an obligation to make the risk clear, and they're not displaying these warnings in the right place. Some are in the footer, some are buried below bold green messaging about a 90% return on the highest risk profile, with the risk explanation underneath. The risk needs to sit closely alongside the returns — not hidden, in an accessible colour, not too small, and in plain language. That's where these firms are failing. There's obviously a sales angle here — if "your capital is at risk" had equal prominence to the returns, fewer people would sign up. What's worrying is where it's positioned, and that the text is often grey, barely present on the page. So the consumer-understanding rule is being broken — it isn't clear enough what risk you're taking on, and it'd be easy to open an account, set your risk appetite high, and be surprised by what happens.

Amelia: Is it fair to expect firms to place risk with equal prominence to potential benefit? Should we expect that?

Paul Wood: Yes — from a marketing perspective you have to sell the benefits, and you don't want to dilute that by immediately flagging what could go wrong. But at the same time you have to educate customers. I was trying to think of a parallel — if you booked a driving instructor, their website wouldn't warn you that you might crash. But then again, does needing a warning like this point to a wider lack of financial education? Are schools teaching what investing is and how it works? That certainly wasn't part of the curriculum when I was at school — I'll find out in a few years what it's like for my daughter. Even a basic level of understanding about investing would reduce the need for warnings that can otherwise feel quite condescending.

Pat: [laughing] "This driving instructor has a 65% fail rate."

I think it's because the stakes are so high, and investing is inherently complicated — you could try to teach it in schools, but a lot of people still wouldn't fully grasp it. It's the combination of high stakes and the desire to make money, which most people have, combined with promotion that says "double your money in five years" with the risk in small print. Someone puts in their life savings — fifty or a hundred grand — and two years later it's worth thirty, and they've been completely done over. The messaging shouldn't be "double your money in five years" with a footnote about downside. It should be upfront: "this is a high-risk product, your returns could range from a 50% gain to a 50% loss, here's our performance." None of the negatives should be hidden in small print — the user should be able to make an informed choice, whether that's "I can afford to lose half my life savings for the upside" or "actually, I should go with the lower-risk product with a 5% expected return and a 2% worst case." That's how financial advisors are trained to brief clients, and it should be no different here.

Amelia: That's risk warnings. Let's talk about cost transparency.

Russ: This ties to what the FCA calls the product life cycle — consumers should have a full view of any additional costs, particularly if they leave a product. What these firms weren't clear about was exit or transfer charges — can you move your money out when you want to, and what does that cost? Even if there's no charge, the firm still needs to make that explicit, and that's what was missing — the consumer doesn't get the full picture of the life cycle: admin fees, costs of withdrawing within a month, and so on. That's what UX Duty picked up, and I've validated some of it myself — I couldn't find this information either. It touches both consumer understanding and consumer support. Users are only seeing half the price if they can't see the exit costs. Part of this comes back to the financial-advisor comparison — websites can be quite two-dimensional here, especially on mobile, where there's less room to lay out costs clearly. Firms certainly wouldn't want to highlight an exit charge percentage, but they should make it clear — and that's what the findings show they don't.

Paul Wood: I'd go further than the charge itself — the exit process. I use an app-based stocks-and-shares ISA that works really well, is transparent about how the money's invested and what the projections are — but it occurred to me I had no idea how I'd actually get money out. There's nothing obvious in the app about it. I dug around and eventually found it buried a couple of layers deep in sub-menus, with a button about transferring money out — I didn't go further than that, so there's still a grey area on how the process actually works; I'd guess it's covered somewhere in the support docs. But investing in is extremely easy — I could switch my brain off and do it — while getting money out is nowhere near as obvious. That's a real flaw.

Pat: That's a dark pattern — a UX design technique that nudges users down a one-way path that isn't necessarily best for them. It's a fairly nefarious practice you see everywhere once you notice it.

Russ: That's what the FCA is referring to with the CFD platform — unsuitable features, as they called it. It'd be great to see specific examples from the FCA of good and bad practice, though I suspect — a bit like us anonymising Firm A, B and C — they're deliberately vague, because naming a specific feature might identify the firm. But this pattern is everywhere in life: easy to get in, hard to get out.

Paul Wood: On exit-cost transparency — Firm A and Firm C weren't transparent, but entry was easy. Does that mean Firm B got this right, or was it just not flagged as critical for them?

Russ: Looking at the report — interesting, and it leads into the next point — one firm did a better job than the other two here. I won't ruin your segue, Amelia, but I'll set it up: Firm A actually describes the target investor properly in the next section; the other two didn't.

Amelia: [laughs] Should we talk about eligibility, then? How clear was that in the process?

Russ: Similar theme. These firms clearly want to get people signed up and capture their details for marketing purposes, pushing them as far through the funnel as possible. But there's a rule that firms must clearly define the target market for their products, and it wastes users' time if they find out halfway through an application that they need a minimum amount to invest, or a certain monthly contribution to get a given rate. Two of the three firms did this more poorly than the third. UX Duty can only get so far through a process — I actually built a new feature for this, where the tool will click "continue" on forms that don't require data (a lot of these live under a single URL), so it can get further into a flow. For one firm it got through to a fairly complex next page, and there was still nothing about eligibility. If you dig around the site you can probably find it somewhere, but it needs to be visible when you're actually signing up. Some of these forms use progressive disclosure — a pattern that's coming up a lot with generative UI — so eligibility criteria surface as you go. That wastes a lot of time if you get to step three and then find out you don't qualify based on your assets. It needs to be much clearer, and it's one of the defined rules under Consumer Duty.

Amelia: Is that a sneaky tactic, or just a natural part of streamlining the journey into smaller steps? Are we being too hard on these firms?

Paul Wood: Firms want people to start the process to capture as many details as possible, so anyone who drops out afterwards is at least known to them. You could argue that's a form of user research — understanding unmet demand. If your eligibility threshold requires a certain investment level and a lot of people drop out at that point, that's useful evidence to take to the board about developing a product for that part of the market. But from the customer's point of view, is that fair? I don't think it is. It is a bit sneaky.

Amelia: Let's move to vulnerability support. What did you find?

Russ: This is one to take seriously — first-time investors with little knowledge, someone dealing with a bereavement, someone with low digital literacy who might not fully understand what they're signing up for. These sites give the impression they assume everyone understands investing and has no particular challenges. In terms of improvements, simple signposting would help — do you need support, is there a number to call, not just an AI chatbot, but the option to book a call with a financial advisor, maybe even visit an office. It's about providing that alternative route and signposting it clearly. It sounds simple.

Amelia: It does sound simple — why aren't firms doing it?

Russ: I think when these sites are designed, the range of personas isn't really considered. This is where Consumer Duty is genuinely useful — its focus on vulnerable customers means firms can't just ignore the fact that people arrive in all sorts of vulnerable situations. There's also signposting to the Financial Ombudsman, which the FCA references a lot in its documentation, and reducing friction generally. But "just speak to a person" seems to be a surprisingly difficult thing for these platforms to offer — more admin, sure, but for some people it's exactly what they want. If I were investing £10,000, I'd probably use these websites for research, then look for someone to actually meet with.

Paul Wood: I wonder if this gets missed at the briefing stage. I might be being unfair, but when a team briefs a new front-end system, they'll focus on personas or an ideal customer profile — and vulnerable users probably aren't a high priority in that profile, or at best a tier-three consideration. So the system gets built well for the imagined "ideal" customer, and compliance becomes an afterthought — a few things bolted on to get it past sign-off. Would this all be solved by baking the consideration in from the start? Same conclusion we reached on accessibility.

Pat: And if they did support vulnerable users properly, would that bring in more customers overall? Think about people in their later years who cleared their mortgage a decade ago and have built up savings to invest — if these platforms supported people with, say, failing eyesight or lower digital confidence well, they'd likely capture more of that audience too.

Russ: Exactly what I was going to say. These firms focus so hard on getting people through the funnel to capture details, but supporting these users properly is also good for the business. There's a concept of the "purple pound" (accessibility) and the "grey pound" (the ageing population) — it's not that these users have less money to invest. If a user has low digital confidence and lands on a confusing site, it might put them off entirely. If they can use it comfortably with a screen reader, they'll trust the firm. About one in five people in the UK have a disability at some point in their lives — this isn't a rare edge case. Building that trust doesn't just conform to Consumer Duty, it likely drives more business too. It needs more of a spotlight, and it keeps coming up on this podcast because it's such a clear, recurring issue.

Amelia: Anything else, Russ?

Russ: One last point, also accessibility. I didn't pick this firm deliberately — the three firms were chosen at random, no swapping once we'd started (I did swap a couple early on only because UX Duty was struggling to scan them). One firm's primary brand colour, used across the whole site including every button, is inaccessible — it's a bright red. Every step of the journey flagged for colour contrast on the homepage. Red is a notoriously tricky colour to work with because of its association with error states, but some brands use it well as a primary colour — you just need the contrast right; you can't pair a very bright red with white text. This isn't just about low vision or age-related eye conditions — it's also situational: using a laptop near a bright window in an airport, or with light streaming into an office, can make low-contrast text unreadable regardless of your eyesight. We've worked on projects exactly like this — one client had a brand colour we darkened slightly to make it accessible, and rolled that out across the whole company, transforming how usable their digital presence was. Another client, we removed one of their brand colours entirely — a highlight colour that was inaccessible — and the site now looks more professional and is far easier to use; they've rolled that change out from their website through to brochures and emails. It sounds like a small change, but getting colour contrast right can have a big impact.

Amelia: Do you think this firm is aware of the issue? Are their creatives in meetings pushing to change it?

Pat: I'd be surprised if they're not aware. As I said earlier, sometimes these contrast issues are baked deep into the brand, so they may see it as an accessibility issue that would require a full brand review to fix — and they've probably got a rebrand project in the pipeline, two or three projects down the line, with this earmarked to be resolved then. That's likely what's going on behind the scenes.

Paul Wood: I wonder if people underestimate how genuinely annoying an issue like that is on every single page — a real pain for people without visual impairments, and a genuine barrier for people who can't read it at all. It's a bit like walking into a supermarket that's rearranged its aisles — it throws you off for a while. That's what using a badly designed accessibility experience feels like.

Pat: Often users can't articulate what's causing the struggle. They go through the site, their cognitive load rises, they get through it but come away thinking "that was tough," without being able to say why. Break it down, and it's the colour contrast straining their eyes, glitchy dropdown menus, and a list of small things adding up to reduce the overall quality of the experience.

Russ: Bright, jarring colours on interactive elements always put me off. This firm could keep the red as a brand colour — just not on calls to action or buttons. Make the buttons black with white text, find another way to use the red if it's that ingrained in the brand. That's a design-team decision, but it also needs to be prioritised by management. I can only imagine how far down the priority list "our red isn't accessible" would sit if it landed in a board report — but it really could make a big difference to their customer base.

Pat: At board level they're probably receiving this feedback, but there's likely no clear link in their minds between the accessibility issue and returning customers, ROI, or revenue impact. They're focused on sales and marketing strategy and where growth will come from, and they'll likely mark accessibility down as a minor issue — when actually it probably does affect growth, because some users are struggling, not signing up, or investing less than they would with an easier-to-use alternative.

Amelia: Accessibility has clearly been a massive theme running through both teardowns so far. It'll be interesting to see what comes up next week. First, a quick round of Jargon Busters — how did you get on last week, Paul?

Paul Wood: Full marks — that was good fun. I enjoyed digging through the secret spreadsheet to pick a term.

Amelia: How did it feel being on the other side?

Pat: Did you look at all the upcoming terms and Google them?

Paul Wood: Yeah, I had a quick look through.

Amelia: For anyone who hasn't caught this before — Jargon Busters is where I put the guys to the test. I pick a term at random from our jargon list, and we see how well they can explain it. This week's term: bull market.

Pat: I always get bull and bear markets confused. One is where everyone's confident and willing to take risk, the other is more timid and risk-averse — I think bear is the timid one and bull the confident one.

Russ: Isn't there a big bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange? I'd be surprised if they put up a statue for the market falling, so it's almost certainly the confident, rising one.

Amelia: Yes — bull market: prices rising, or expected to rise.

Pat: I'm still not sure why bear is the timid one — bears aren't timid, they're scarier than bulls.

Amelia: Very true — maybe a discussion for another episode. Well done, though. More Jargon Busters next week. Speaking of which — next week's teardown is mortgages. Probably the biggest financial decision most people will ever make, right, Paul?

Paul Wood: Yeah — a bit of homework for us. Mortgages felt like the natural next step: it's a huge decision, and in the UK there's a cultural aspiration to own your own home — maybe less so in some other countries — so a lot of people will be navigating this market at some point. It's also quite fragmented: you might go via a broker, direct to a lender, or deal with a separate servicer, so up to three different firms could be involved in your mortgage. And it's an area the FCA is actively looking at right now, so it made sense as the next one to dig into.

Amelia: Looking forward to it. That's next week — thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next Friday.

Russ: See you then.

Paul Wood: Cheers.

Pat: Cheers.