02.07.2025
Embedding the Duty, Empowering Trust: Intrum’s Evolving Commitment to Consumer Outcomes
Adhering to the Consumer Duty is crucial for businesses as it puts customers at the heart of decision making, enhances transparency and ensures fair treatment. Compliance not only reduces legal and financial risks, it strengthens our reputation and operational efficiency. By prioritising consumer interests, we build trust, loyalty, and long-term relationships with our customers.
Continuing to assess and improve Intrum’s approach to Consumer Duty is an essential aspect of our business. As we move into Q3 of 2025, what stage have we reached, and where are we heading?
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) introduced the Consumer Duty to set higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across all financial services. The initiative aims to ensure that firms consistently prioritise customer needs, delivering good outcomes and preventing foreseeable harm.
Business importance:
Adhering to the Consumer Duty is crucial for businesses as it puts customers at the heart of decision making, enhances transparency and ensures fair treatment. Compliance not only reduces legal and financial risks, it strengthens our reputation and operational efficiency. By prioritising consumer interests, we build trust, loyalty, and long-term relationships with our customers.
Consumer experience:
Consumer Duty enhances trust as customers can be confident that the financial services they choose are transparent, fair and accountable. The initiative empowers consumers, ensuring they receive clear information and fair treatment, leading to a more positive customer experience. This drives customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, ultimately benefiting both consumers and businesses.
Significant milestones at Intrum UK
Intrum UK has taken significant steps to meet the FCA requirements.
An important milestone was the publication of our Consumer Duty 2024 Board Report, a document we prepare for our governing body.
The purpose of the report is to provide the Intrum Board with a clear view of customer outcomes, allowing them to ensure that the Duty is being delivered. The report includes data on outcomes, an analysis of different customer types, clear processes for production of the report, and evidenced focus on culture throughout the firm. It also highlights areas for improvement, such as ways to enhance data quality and achieve comprehensive views across distribution chains. Particular initiatives which demonstrate this include:
• Customer Dashboards
At Intrum, we have developed a suite of customer insight dashboards that provide our business with a clear and transparent view of performance against key Consumer Duty focus areas. These dashboards are aligned with the four pillars of the Duty, featuring metrics and guardrails that support our approach to root cause analysis.
• Governance
A well-structured and multi-disciplined customer experience committee has been implemented to monitor, track and challenge the overall performance of the business against customer-centric KPIs.
• Consumer Duty Board Champion
Whilst no longer a regulatory requirement, Intrum UK have maintained their Consumer Duty Board Champion. This decision was driven by the value and focus provided through independent Board challenge and oversight, which has delivered tangible benefits to the wider business.
• Customer Characteristics Insights
We have introduced insight-driven reports that highlight critical customer impact areas, such as vulnerability. These insights are used alongside our customer persona testing to continuously support the delivery of positive outcomes.
Empowered by Values, Driven by Duty
At Intrum, our approach to Consumer Duty is deeply rooted in our culture and guided by our core values of Solutions, Empathy, Ethics, and Dedication. We empower our people to deliver meaningful outcomes by equipping them with the tools, insights, and governance needed to act in the best interests of our customers.
Through innovative solutions like our customer insight dashboards and persona testing, we ensure our services are tailored to real needs. Our value of empathy drives us to understand and support vulnerable customers, while our unwavering commitment to ethics ensures transparency, fairness, and accountability in every decision. Above all, it is our dedication - evident in initiatives like maintaining a Consumer Duty Board Champion and embedding customer-centric KPIs - that ensures we go beyond compliance to build trust, loyalty, and long-term value.
This alignment between our people, our purpose, and our values ensures Consumer Duty is not just a regulatory requirement, but a reflection of who we are and how we lead in the credit management industry.
What’s next for Intrum in Consumer Duty?
As a next step, Intrum UK will continue to drive and leverage the insights and outcomes take from the implemented Consumer Duty focus groups, enabling us to further embed the duty within our operations. This will allow us to be more consistent and creative in gaining valuable insights and feedback from our customers.
We also continue to evolve and refine our key data insights, measuring outcomes across different customer types and all servicing platforms. We have increased data analysis, taking in key themes identified from outcome testing, our risk framework and complaints. The root causes of these are matched to the four outcomes of the Duty:
- Products and services: Ensuring that products are designed to meet customer needs and are distributed appropriately.
- Price and value: Providing fair value to consumers.
- Consumer understanding: Helping consumers understand the products and services they are using.
- Consumer support: Assisting consumers in achieving their financial objectives.
Finally, as a leading Credit Management business in the UK and Europe, we continue to invest in industry-leading technologies to further improve our oversight of customer outcomes; enhance digital options for our customers; and improve the systems our teams are using, so they have more time to focus on customer support.
Consumer experience lies at the heart of credit management. Intrum UK will continue to evolve and enhance our approach to customers to meet the changing environment and needs.
