The FCA's Consumer Duty framework came into force in July 2023. It sets an explicit expectation that firms deliver good outcomes for customers - clear communication, products that meet real needs, support that's accessible when people actually need it. Most mid-market financial services firms I speak to will tell you they're compliant. And they probably are, on paper.
What I find interesting is that Consumer Duty doesn't just ask whether you've ticked the box on clear communication. It asks whether the outcome for the client is genuinely good. When you apply that lens to the digital experience most mid-market B2B financial services firms are actually delivering - the portals, the onboarding journeys, the way clients access their own information - the gap between "technically compliant" and "actually good" is wider than most leadership teams realise.
We decided to find out exactly how wide.
[RESEARCH NOTE: The findings, rankings, and specific data points referenced throughout this article are drawn from Distinction's structured assessment of [X] mid-market B2B financial services firms across wealth management, corporate finance, asset management, and insurance. The methodology and sample details are described below. This article cannot be published until that primary research is complete.]
Over the past [timeframe], we assessed [X] mid-market B2B financial services firms against six dimensions of digital experience: website clarity and navigation, client portal presence and usability, digital onboarding process, self-service capability for routine requests, mobile experience, and security perception - the visual and UX signals that communicate data security without requiring a technical explanation.
The sample covers a meaningful cross-section of the mid-market B2B financial services landscape: wealth management firms, corporate finance advisers, asset managers, and insurance businesses. We weren't looking at retail banks or consumer fintechs - that's a different conversation. We were looking at the firms where relationships are high-value, trust is everything, and the digital experience is supposed to support a fundamentally human service rather than replace it.
Each assessment followed a consistent methodology. We evaluated every firm as a prospective client would encounter them: arriving at the website cold, navigating to understand the proposition, attempting to access self-service features, testing the onboarding flow where one existed, and assessing the mobile experience across multiple devices. We also reviewed the security signals - not the actual security infrastructure, which you can't assess from the outside, but the perception of security that the experience creates. In financial services, perception and reality both matter.
I should be upfront about something. This isn't a survey. We didn't ask firms to self-report. We assessed what a client would actually experience, which is a fundamentally different thing. Self-reporting tends to be generous. The outside-in view tends to be less so.
I've written a companion piece on what B2B financial services clients actually expect now, and the findings here land harder when you read them alongside that expectations picture. The gap between what clients want and what most firms deliver isn't theoretical - it's measurable.
Before I get into where the sector falls short - which, honestly, is where most of the findings sit - let me talk about what good actually looks like. Because there are firms getting this right, and what they do well isn't complicated. It's just deliberate.
[PLACEHOLDER: Specific findings from top-performing firms in the assessment sample. The following illustrative examples should be replaced with or validated against actual research findings.]
The firms that scored highest shared a few characteristics worth calling out.
They surface information before the client has to ask for it. The best client dashboards we reviewed didn't just present a static snapshot of a portfolio or account. They surfaced what was relevant right now - upcoming maturities, recent transactions needing attention, valuation changes with context attached. One wealth management firm [to be named or anonymised based on agreement] had built a dashboard that flagged when a client's portfolio had drifted outside their stated risk tolerance, with a plain-English explanation and a single-click route to their adviser. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the kind of proactive communication that keeps clients for decades.
Their fee and process transparency doesn't require a phone call to decode. This one surprised me, actually. I expected transparency to be table stakes in a sector that's been through MiFID II, the RDR, and now Consumer Duty. But there's a meaningful difference between publishing a fee schedule in a PDF buried three clicks deep and presenting fees in context - showing a client what they're paying, what it covers, and how it compares to what they paid last year. The best firms treated transparency as a design challenge. The worst treated it as a regulatory obligation to discharge as quietly as possible.
Onboarding felt organised from the first interaction. The leading firms had digital onboarding flows that guided new clients through the process with clear steps, progress indicators, and the ability to save and return. One firm had reduced its average onboarding time from [X days] to [X days] simply by moving from emailed PDF forms to a structured digital flow with document upload and e-signature. The client didn't have to print anything, scan anything, or wonder what happened next. It sounds basic. In this sector, it isn't.
They got mobile right - properly right. Not just responsive. Not just "it works on a phone." Actually designed for the way clients interact with their financial information on mobile. Quick-glance portfolio summaries. Biometric login. The ability to approve a transaction or respond to a request without needing to find a laptop. The firms that scored highest on mobile had clearly treated it as a primary channel, not an afterthought.
Right, here's the uncomfortable bit. And I want to frame this carefully, because there's a likely objection I hear a lot from managing directors in this sector:
We're probably where most firms in our sector are. The whole sector is behind on this.
I get it. There's a kernel of truth in it - the sector median isn't high. But the problem with that logic is twofold. Your clients aren't comparing you to your sector median. They're comparing you to the last really good digital experience they had, which was probably Monzo or Revolut or their mortgage app. And the firms at the top of this benchmark aren't operating on some different planet with a bigger budget. They're making different choices with similar resources. So "the whole sector is behind" isn't a defence - it's an opportunity. The bar is low enough that moving meaningfully above it is achievable.
Here's where the gaps are most concentrated, ranked by likely commercial impact.
[PLACEHOLDER: Specific findings from the assessment, ranked by commercial impact. The following structure should be populated with actual research data.]
This was the single biggest gap across the sample. [X%] of the firms we assessed had either no self-service capability at all or a portal that offered little beyond document download and a contact form.
The routine requests clients most commonly want to handle independently - retrieving a statement, updating contact details, accessing a tax certificate, downloading a valuation report - still require a phone call or an email at most mid-market firms. Every one of those calls costs you money, takes up your team's time, and slightly erodes the client's confidence that you're running a modern operation.
I spoke to a client services director at a wealth management firm last year - around 400 clients, mostly HNW individuals and family offices, good reputation in their region - who told me, with a straight face, that their clients "prefer to call." We were in a review meeting, going through the portal analytics, and I'd just pointed out that the most-visited page on their client portal was the contact page. Not the portfolio dashboard. The contact page. When I asked whether they'd ever actually tested that assumption by offering a genuine self-service alternative, the answer was no. They'd never built one good enough to test the hypothesis. That's not client preference. That's status quo bias dressed up as insight.
Most firms in the sample communicated on their own schedule - quarterly reports, annual reviews, regulatory updates when required. Very few had built communication triggers around events relevant to the client: a market movement that affected their portfolio, an approaching renewal, a regulatory change that specifically impacted their situation.
This matters because proactive communication is one of the strongest drivers of trust in financial services. The Edelman Trust Barometer consistently shows that [STAT: specific Edelman data on trust drivers in financial services - to be confirmed via desk research]. When a client hears from you before they have to chase you, it signals competence and care. When they only hear from you on your quarterly schedule, it signals that you're managing your process, not their relationship.
Consumer Duty is relevant here too. The FCA's expectation of "good outcomes" includes ensuring that clients receive communications that are timely and relevant - not just accurate. A firm that only communicates on its own reporting cycle and never in response to client-relevant events is meeting the letter of the regulation while missing its spirit pretty comprehensively.
[X%] of the firms assessed had a mobile experience that was technically responsive but functionally compromised. Forms that were painful to complete on a phone. PDFs that required pinch-and-zoom. Login processes that hadn't been optimised for mobile. Portal features that simply didn't work properly on smaller screens.
This matters more than it used to. Your clients manage their Monzo account, approve mortgage payments, and check their pension on their phone - while waiting for a train, sitting in a meeting that's running long, or lying on the sofa at 10pm. When they try to do the same with your firm and the experience is clunky or broken, you haven't just failed a UX test. You've failed a trust test. The unspoken question in their mind is: if they can't get a mobile app right, what else are they getting wrong?
I've written separately about why digital trust is now a competitive advantage in financial services - and the mobile experience is one of the most visible trust signals you have.
Nearly every firm in the sample had the required regulatory disclosures, fee information, and terms accessible somewhere on their site. Technically present. Practically useless for anyone who isn't a compliance professional.
There's a real irony here. The entire point of the post-RDR, post-MiFID II, Consumer Duty regulatory environment is to make financial services clearer and fairer for clients. And most firms have responded by publishing the required information in language that's optimised for regulatory review rather than client understanding. The compliance team signs it off. The client doesn't read it. Nobody wins.
The firms that scored highest on transparency had done something simple but apparently difficult: they'd rewritten their fee explanations, process descriptions, and regulatory disclosures in language a client would actually understand, then kept the formal regulatory versions available for those who needed them. Two versions. Same information. Different audiences. It's not rocket science, but [X%] of the sample hadn't done it.
I want to spend a moment on something that came through clearly in the assessment and that I think is shaping client expectations faster than most firms appreciate.
Your clients use Monzo. They use Revolut. They use Starling. Apps that show them their balance in real time, send a notification when a payment goes out, let them freeze a card with one tap, and explain their spending patterns in plain English with nice little graphs.
And then they log into your client portal - assuming you have one - and they're looking at a static PDF from last quarter.
I'm not suggesting that a mid-market wealth management firm needs to build a consumer fintech app. That would be absurd, and it would miss the point of the relationship. But the expectation transfer is real. When someone has experienced genuinely good digital financial services in their personal life, their tolerance for poor digital financial services in their professional life drops. Not to zero - they understand the contexts are different. But it drops significantly, and it keeps dropping every time Monzo ships another feature.
This is particularly acute for the next generation of decision-makers moving into senior roles at your client organisations. They didn't grow up calling their bank. They grew up tapping their phone. If your firm's digital experience feels like it belongs to a previous decade, you're not just losing convenience points. You're signalling something about your firm's modernity and capability that's hard to undo in a face-to-face meeting.
There's a deeper piece on how the shift from transactions to relationships is playing out in B2B financial services that's worth reading alongside this.
[PLACEHOLDER: This section requires the primary research findings to populate. The structure below is indicative.]
Across the six assessment dimensions, here's how the sample performed:
DimensionTop quartile scoreMedian scoreBottom quartile scoreWebsite clarity and navigation[X/10][X/10][X/10]Client portal usability[X/10][X/10][X/10]Digital onboarding[X/10][X/10][X/10]Self-service capability[X/10][X/10][X/10]Mobile experience[X/10][X/10][X/10]Proactive communication[X/10][X/10][X/10]
[Commentary on the distribution - where the biggest variance exists, where the sector is most consistently weak, where the top performers pull away.]
The dimension with the widest spread between top and bottom quartile was [X], which suggests [interpretation]. The dimension where even the best performers scored relatively modestly was [X] - which tells you something about how much room there is for differentiation.
Here's the honest question. Reading through those findings, where would you place your firm?
Not where you'd like it to be. Not where your last board presentation said it was. Where it actually is, right now, if a prospective client landed on your website today and tried to understand what you do, how much it costs, and whether they could trust you with their money.
If you want to find out properly, we've built a self-assessment checklist calibrated against the benchmark findings. It covers the six dimensions we assessed, with three to four observable indicators per criterion and a scoring methodology that tells you specifically what "below average" and "above average" mean relative to the sector. It takes about 30 minutes to complete, and it's designed to be done by a marketing leader or operations director and shared with a managing partner before an investment conversation.
[Download the financial services digital experience self-assessment checklist]
The checklist is deliberately practical. It's not asking you to rate yourself on a vague scale of "digital maturity." It's asking you to observe specific things about your own digital experience - things a client would notice - and score them against what we found in the benchmark. If your portal doesn't let clients retrieve their own statements without calling you, that's a specific score against a specific criterion. No ambiguity.
Let me bring this back to money, because that's what gets these conversations past the "interesting, thanks" stage and into the "we need to do something about this" stage.
Client retention in mid-market B2B financial services is overwhelmingly driven by trust and perceived competence. [STAT: PwC or Deloitte data on digital experience and client retention in B2B financial services - to be confirmed via desk research.] When a client's digital experience with your firm is materially worse than their experience with their consumer bank, their employer's benefits platform, or their favourite e-commerce site, it creates a low-level dissonance that accumulates over time.
They won't leave because your portal is bad. They'll leave because a competitor's portal is good, and that competitor also picked up the phone proactively when the market moved. The digital experience isn't usually the reason a client leaves. But it's almost always part of the reason a client stays.
And then there's the new business angle. Referred prospects - the lifeblood of most mid-market financial services firms - form their first impression digitally before any conversation takes place. If your website doesn't clearly communicate what you do, who you do it for, and why you're credible, that referral is doing heavy lifting against a headwind. I've watched managing directors spend serious money on relationship development and business entertainment while their website quietly undermines the impression they've worked so hard to create. I had a conversation with a managing partner a few years back - lovely bloke, genuinely excellent at his job, clients adored him - who'd just spent £30k on a client event. His website hadn't been touched in four years. The event was great. The website was sending a different message entirely.
We've put together detailed thinking on the investment case for firms ready to act on these findings - worth reading if the numbers here are making you uncomfortable in a productive way.
If you've read this far and you're thinking your firm is probably in the bottom half of this benchmark, you've got two options.
The first is the self-assessment checklist. Download it, work through it honestly, and use it to have a specific conversation with your board about where you are relative to your competitive set. It won't tell you everything - a self-assessment never does - but it'll give you a sharper picture than "we're probably about average."
[Download the financial services digital experience self-assessment checklist]
The second is a structured review. If you'd prefer someone from outside the firm to assess your specific digital experience against your competitive set - the same methodology we used for this benchmark, applied to your firm and your direct competitors - we can scope that conversation. I've written about what a digital experience review actually looks like if you want to understand the process before committing to anything.
[Book a scoping conversation]
The worst thing you can do with this information is file it under "interesting but not urgent." The firms at the top of this benchmark didn't get there by accident. They got there by deciding that the digital experience was a trust signal, not an overhead. And in a sector where trust is literally the product, that matters more than most boards appreciate. (That distinction - sorry, couldn't resist.)