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Consumer Duty

We're here to support you with the right tools and resources, helping you to understand the Consumer Duty.

We share the Consumer Duty’s deep commitment to good consumer outcomes, consumer protection and the sharing of best practice to achieve both. We know that our intermediaries do too.

So we’ve put together this page to support you. It shows you where to find everything you’ll need to meet your own Consumer Duty requirements, before and after they come into force on 31 July.

We want to make sure you know how our products and services are designed to meet the needs of customers and priced to offer fair value to them.

Then you can make sure that your customers clearly understand our products and services and get all the help and support they need, every step of the way.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) had set the following deadlines for the Consumer Duty:

  • October 2022: The FCA have requested all firms and providers to agree their implementation plans towards full compliance and document how they're meeting the Consumer Duty
  • April 2023: Providers need to have communicated their fair value assessments for their open products which are products available to retail customers and completed all reviews necessary to meet the outcome rules
  • July 2023: The implementation deadline for new and existing open products, and advisers need to be able to evidence their firm is meeting the new standards
  • July 2024: The implementation deadline now applies to all closed products and services

Target market and fair value

Find help, support and resources from our Protection, Guaranteed Income, Mortgage Club and Home Finance services to feel better equipped about The Consumer Duty.

Protection

Our Target Market and Fair Value guide PDF: 645KB explains all of our protection products in a customer-focused, Consumer Duty-driven way.

The Protection Product Governance, Fair Value and Consumer Duty guide PDF: 504KB shares our approaches to each area, and also includes our product target market and distribution strategy thinking.

Explore Secrets of Protection Success, an exclusive report that shares practical, actionable insights and advice from some of the industry’s top advisers, to help you achieve better customer outcomes.;

Please get in touch if you have any changes to your fees and charges.

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Annuities

Our product value assessments take full account of the Consumer Duty’s outcomes and cross-cutting rules, and our product summaries describe target markets and possible clients can be found on our hub.

Mortgage Club

Our Consumer Duty Webinars share ongoing insights and updates from industry experts within and beyond Legal & General.

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Home Finance

Our regulatory updates on the Consumer Duty are available on our product governance hub.

Workplace Pension

On the Workplace Consumer Duty hub, we explain how we've used the Consumer Duty outcomes to make our service offering even better

You can find out how we created fair value assessments and read product summaries of all our Workplace Pension products:

WorkSave Pension Plan PDF: 703KB

WorkSave Mastertrust PDF: 704KB

WorkSave Buy Out Plan PDF: 845KB

Group Stakeholder PDF: 745KB

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Personal investing

For information on our Personal Pension Drawdown and Workplace ISA products and the Fair Value Assessments, read our product summaries:

Personal Pension Drawdown product summary PDF: 503KB

Workplace ISA product summary PDF: 491KB

Frequently asked questions

The Consumer Duty is a very significant piece of regulation that sets higher expectations for the standard of care firms across the financial services industry give to consumers.

It has been described by the FCA as a “paradigm shift” in its expectations of firms in retail markets. Its purpose is to drive cultural change and in still consumer trust and confidence. It introduces a new Principle that “A firm must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers”.

The products and services outcome rules are central to firms acting to deliver good outcomes. They set out a range of requirements, including the need for relevant firms to:

  • ensure that the design of the product or service meets the needs, characteristics, and objectives of customers in the identified target market
  • ensure that the intended distribution strategy for the product or service is appropriate for the target market
  • carry out regular reviews to ensure that the product or service continues to meet the needs, characteristics, and objectives of the target market

The price and value outcome

The specific focus of the price and value outcome rules is on ensuring the price the customer pays for a product or service is reasonable compared to the overall benefits (the nature, quality, and benefits the customer will experience considering all these factors). Value needs to be considered in the round and low prices do not always mean fair value. The FCA expects firms to think about price when assessing fair value but not at the expense of other factors.

The consumer understanding outcome

The consumer understanding outcome rules retain the obligation under Principle 7 for firms to communicate information in a way that is clear, fair, and not misleading. But they also build on, and go further than, Principle 7 by requiring firms to:

  • support their customers’ understanding by ensuring that their communications meet the information needs of customers, are likely to be understood by customers intended to receive the communication, and equip them to make decisions that are effective, timely, and properly informed
  • tailor communications considering the characteristics of the customers intended to receive the communication – including any characteristics of vulnerability, the complexity of products, the communication channel used, and the role of the firm
  • when interacting directly with a customer on a one-to-one basis, where appropriate, tailor communications to meet the information needs of the customer, and ask them if they understand the information and have any further questions
  • test, monitor, and adapt communications to support understanding and good outcomes for the customer

The consumer support outcome

The consumer support outcome rules set overarching requirements in relation to the support firms provide their customers. They should be read in conjunction with other rules that cover specific elements of the servicing of customers, such as our Dispute Resolution: Complaints (DISP) rules. They require firms to:

  • design and deliver support that meets the needs of customers, including those with characteristics of vulnerability
  • ensure that customers can use their products as reasonably anticipated
  • ensure they include appropriate friction in customer journeys to mitigate the risk of harm and give customers sufficient opportunity to understand and assess their options, including any risks
  • ensure that customers do not face unreasonable barriers (including unreasonable additional costs) during the lifecycle of a product or service
  • monitor the quality of the support they are offering, looking for evidence that may indicate areas where they fall short of the outcome, and act promptly to address these, and
  • ensure they do not disadvantage groups of customers, including those with characteristics of vulnerability

The breadth and scope of the new requirements mean that we’ll need to:

  • work closely with our distributors and suppliers to collectively deliver good customer outcomes
  • carefully consider the data and management information we receive and share across our customer journeys, ensuring greater transparency and the right levels of oversight across all parts of the distribution chain
  • continue to engage with the regulator and other stakeholders during the iterative implementation period, supporting industry-wide best practice.

We have a good understanding of the vulnerabilities present within our customer base through extensive research and analysis and have worked with specialist charities to ensure we have the right solutions available to support our customer’s needs.

All frontline staff are trained on how to identify a vulnerability and how to support vulnerable customers. We have oversight models in place to provide assurance that we're effective at ensuring good outcomes for our vulnerable customers.

We have a range of treatment solutions for customers including adapted communications (braille, large print, audio, coloured paper etc), payment holidays, signposting to charities like MacMillan or Samaritans and we have processes in place to actively signpost customers to benefits in their policy, e.g. Wellbeing support when appropriate.

We have forums in place that regularly reviews the feedback from customers in order to identify and deliver improvements.

Get in touch

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Protection

Contact information for dedicated Protection teams.

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Annuities

Contact area for guaranteed income and immediate needs annuity.

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Mortgage Club

Contact information for Mortgage Club support services team.

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Over 50s Mortgages

Contact information for Over 50s Mortgages teams.

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Workplace Pension

Contact the Workplace Pension team.

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Personal Investing

Find contact information for Personal Investing teams.