What Is Consumer Duty?

The Financial Conduct Authority (the 'FCA') has introduced rules for car and van manufacturers, dealers and brokers who provide finance to customers (amongst many others).

The rules cover both retail 'personal' customers and small businesses (such as sole traders or small limited companies with a sole director/shareholder - often called 'one-man-bands').

The 'Consumer Duty' rules introduce higher and clearer standards in consumer protection and place significant additional responsibilities on those who provide finance to customers.

You can learn more about Consumer Duty by clicking on the links below:

What Does Our Personal Consumer Duty Calculator Do?

Our Personal Consumer Duty Calculator;

• identifies the priorities for the customer for funding a car;
• walks the manufacturer, dealer or broker through selecting a car;
• lists the finance options available from the supplier; and
• demonstrates that the finance product meets the requirements of the customer.

The calculator takes account of key factors for the cost of each finance product and relates the suggested finance to the customer's requirements and objectives for funding.

How Does The Calculator Do It?

Our Personal Consumer Duty Personal Calculator provides an analysis of the cost and cash-flow impact on a retail personal customer of buying a new car vs finance or leasing over a specified term and mileage.

Our Personal Consumer Duty Calculator creates cost and cash-flow comparisons for:

• Ouright Purchase
• Personal Contract Hire
• Personal Contract Purchase
• Personal Hire Purchase

You can select the:

• customer's personal profile
• car (we also have a standard equipment/options selection package available)
• type of finance
• finance term
• finance plan (number of advance/remaining payments)
• annual vehicle mileage

What Does It Provide?

Our Personal Consumer Duty Calculator prepares a comparison of the cost and cash-flow impact of buying a vehicle vs funding the vehicle through finance or leasing.

We use an initial analysis of the cost of buying outright (whether or not the customer has the funds to be able to do so) as this creates a base-line for costs.

All other costs of finance are then compared to the cost of buying outright.

Using customer information and preferences you can:

• build a comprehensive comparison of the cost to a customer of buying or financing/leasing a car;
• show the customer the financial impact of each type of funding you offer; and
• compare the impact of using a customer's own funds to buy a car in comparison to the financed acquisition or leasing of the car.

Remember that we can also build into the calculator other issues such as vulnerable customer identification, personal budget/affordability calculations, tax rates, etc.

All of the functions of the Consumer Duty Calculator that you see below can be built-in to your existing Consumer Duty processes, including importing into your existing software as an Application Programming Interface or API 'widget' as part of the customer's journey to a vehicle.

Getting Started

To get started you create a customer profile based on information about the customer (including requirements for finance), followed by details of the vehicle and then the finance you offer.

In our demonstration module we have provided comparisons of buying outright, personal leasing (PCH), personal contract hire, personal contract purchase and hire purchase, but we can apply any funding method to the calculator.