Duty of Care

Dateline: Melbourne, 11th August 2023.At the end of last month, the UK’s new regulations around consumer outcomes came into effect. These regulations, known as the “Consumer Duty” regulations, require financial services organisations to act in good faith, avoid foreseeable harm and help customers to achieve their financial objectives. They also require organisations to provide customer support that is “responsive and helpful”. Now, I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know what “good faith”, “foreseeable” or “helpful” mean, but even so I cannot see how organisations will be able to deliver any of these outcomes cost-effectively without using AI. But given that the customers will be bots anyway, that’s probably a good idea.Subscribe nowChats With BotsOne of the reasons why I think AI-to-AI connections are the only way to make this new duty work is that the outcomes depend to large extent on customer understanding and providing customers with the information that they need to make decisions. ChatGPT and its brethren can speed through emails and instant messages, web chats and social media posts to reviews the language, wording and structure used to detect compliance issues. For example, the bots may detect vague or potentially misleading language which fails to properly inform consumers.ShareI have to say that it is not clear to me that informing consumers will actually help with outcomes because some years ago I was involved in a research project looking at obtaining informed consent from British consumers. The conclusion, as I recall, was that while obtaining consent was…Duty of Care