Fairer Finance launches Fair Value asessment tool to help tackle Consumer Duty

Fairer Finance has launched a Fair Value Report tool to allow financial service firms to assess the value offered by their products by benchmarking them against the wider market, showing how they compare on the comprehensiveness of their product features, the price they charge, and the service they offer.

The tool is ideal for firms who want to ensure they meet the fair value standards set by the FCA’s Consumer Duty. The Fairer Finance Fair Value Report tool uses complete and continuously-maintained datasets, which include every product in the market across a wide range of sectors. This includes various insurance and banking sectors, such as motor, home and travel insurance as well as current accounts, savings accounts, personal loans and credit cards. This means that financial service firms have the most useful and up-to-date information available for assessing the value of their offerings.

James Daley, managing director of Fairer Finance, the consumer group and ratings provider, said: “Consumer duty requires that firms prove they are offering fair value - so it’s more important than ever that companies are clear on how they shape up against their competitors. Until now, many firms have carried out a cursory and irregular reviews of a handful of their competitors - but that is unlikely to stand up to scrutiny in the new Consumer Duty regime.

“Our new fair value tool looks to provide firms an instant view on how they shape up against all their competitors on product features, service and price. While for those that need to dive further into the detail, there’s also the ability to do a feature by feature comparison with the market - or with key competitors.”

Key features of the Fair Value Report tool include:

1. Product feature analysis and benchmarking

• See measures of the depth and breadth of product features, and where firms can improve.
• Evaluate how a firm’s products compare to those of their competitors.
• Compare products ranked by comprehensiveness.
• See two or more products side-by-side to directly compare every feature.

2. Price data

• See how a firm’s product compares to the rest of the market on price.
• Quickly identify whether products are over or under-valued relative to their features.

3. Service quality analysis

• See polling data derived from a twice-yearly survey on 10,000 customers.
• Get insight into how satisfied and trusting providers’ customers are, and what causes them to be happy and pick their provider.
• Understand how transparent a firm’s customer journeys and terms and conditions/policy wordings are through unique transparency analysis, and see how to improve.

4. FCA Consumer Duty compliance

• Identify areas where your products may fall short on fair value.

5. Exportable Reports

• Export reports in excel or pdf that show how your products compare to the market on comprehensiveness, price and service.

For more information about Fairer Finance or its new Fair Value Report tool, please visit this page or read this guide.