FCA-Compliant CX + AI Contact Centres for UK Financial Services

Consumer Duty, introduced by the FCA, requires firms to demonstrate that their products and services deliver good outcomes for retail customers across four areas: products and value, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support.

For contact centres using AI, this means every automated interaction must be designed to produce a good outcome, and firms must hold evidence to prove it. AI deployments without audit trails, escalation protocols, and outcome tracking are directly exposed to Consumer Duty risk.

Under the FCA's principles-based approach, there is no standalone AI Senior Manager Function. Accountability for AI outcomes sits within existing SM&CR structures, typically with the Chief Risk Officer (SMF4) or Chief Operations Officer (SMF24). This means a named Senior Manager is already personally liable for AI-related failures in your contact centre.

Our governance framework ensures that person has the visibility, documentation, and audit trail to demonstrate control.

AI identifies vulnerability indicators in real time through speech patterns, language cues, and emotional markers, flagging distress, confusion, or signs of financial difficulty during live interactions. When indicators are detected, pre-defined escalation protocols route the customer to a trained human agent, with the full interaction context preserved.

Every escalation is logged and timestamped, creating an auditable record that directly supports your Consumer Duty consumer support outcome obligations.

A chatbot handles defined, rule-based interactions: answering FAQs, capturing contact details, routing calls. It is best suited to high-volume, low-complexity queries where the outcome is predictable. An AI agent handles multi-turn, context-dependent conversations, can take actions within systems, and manages more complex customer journeys.

The right choice depends on your use case, your regulatory risk profile, and the complexity of the interactions involved. We help you make that decision before any technology is selected.

Good outcome evidencing requires three things: full interaction logging across all channels, outcome-specific metrics beyond handling time (such as resolution quality rate and consumer understanding confirmation), and a retrievable audit trail for every AI-assisted decision.

We design these capabilities into the platform from the start, so your compliance team has what it needs without retrofitting reporting onto a live system.

If your contact centre handles card payment data across any channel, phone, IVR, web chat, or email, PCI DSS compliance is the expected standard. Non-compliance carries substantial fines that can be imposed without court orders, as well as reputational risk and the potential loss of payment card brand relationships.

We assess your current payment data flows, identify gaps, and implement controls that protect cardholder data without disrupting the customer experience.