The FCA's second Enforcement Watch newsletter tells a simple story with a sharp edge: open Consumer Duty enforcement investigations have grown from six to eleven since the first edition, covering insurance, pensions, wealth management, consumer investments, peer-to-peer lending and claims management. Alongside those investigations sit roughly thirty skilled person reviews and 382 supervisory interventions over the past year. This is not a regulator testing the water. It is a regulator with a caseload.
It is worth pausing on what that caseload has already produced. One intervention, on vehicle valuation practices, has delivered £200 million in redress to 270,000 motorists — not through a headline enforcement action, but through supervisory pressure applied well before matters reached that stage. That is the part firms tend to underweight when they think about Consumer Duty risk. The FCA does not need to open a formal investigation to change outcomes for consumers, or to change outcomes for the firm involved. Supervision is doing real work, quietly, in parallel with enforcement.
The FCA does not need to open a formal investigation to change outcomes for consumers. Supervision is doing real work, quietly, in parallel with enforcement.
A narrower scope is not a lighter touch
The timing matters too. This enforcement acceleration is landing in the same month firms are weighing the FCA's CP26/23 consultation, which proposes narrowing the Duty's scope by removing genuinely non-UK customers and clarifying distribution chain responsibilities. Put the two developments side by side and you get an interesting tension: the boundary of what the Duty covers may be about to tighten, even as the intensity of enforcement inside that boundary is increasing. A narrower scope is not a lighter touch. If anything, it sharpens the FCA's focus onto exactly the population of firms and customers it has decided the Duty should cover.
The bar has moved
For three years, most firms have treated the Consumer Duty primarily as a monitoring exercise: build the dashboards, track the outcomes, report to the board. That was a reasonable first phase. It is no longer a sufficient one. With eleven live investigations and a track record of nine-figure redress outcomes, the question a board needs answered is not "are we monitoring outcomes" but "can we show, with evidence, that a specific issue was identified, a remediation was designed, that remediation was tested, and its effectiveness was verified afterwards." That is a materially higher bar than most Consumer Duty programmes were built to clear when they were designed back in 2023.
What boards should do now
My advice to boards right now is straightforward. Do not wait for your firm to appear in the next Enforcement Watch update before asking the question. Ask your risk and audit committee for the remediation trail behind your top three Consumer Duty issues today — not the monitoring data that flagged them, but the paper trail showing what was done about them and how that was verified. If that trail does not exist in a form you would be comfortable showing an FCA investigator, that is the gap to close this quarter, not next year.