Article
Targeted support: the next test is measurement
September 4, 2026
by Ben Leonard
CEO & Co-Founder at Life Moments
Over the past twelve months, one theme has dominated our conversations with wealth and workplace clients above all others: targeted support.
At Life Moments, this was a natural area for us to focus on deeply. We have been delivering personalised guidance for eight years, building cohort based segmentation and nudging, using much of the same technology firms are now deploying for targeted support.
We contributed to the consultation, engaged with the Information Commissioner’s Office on PECR and designing for privacy, dropped into many working groups across the industry, and supported design and creative principles for others taking targeted support to market. But that is just the start.
The thing we found ourselves saying most often, in room after room, was this: when you are delivering education, engagement and personalisation together, you need every stakeholder present from the beginning. Compliance, technology, content, user experience and customer experience, alongside the product owners for each product area, all feeding into a single experience designed to activate, engage and then build consumer trust.
In our experience, what good looks like is a senior sponsor with a strong customer narrative and a clear customer vision. A sponsor who empowers each of those teams to have a voice from the very beginning and then works iteratively towards delivering it. Where that happens, the commercial opportunity tends to fall out of the work rather than having to be engineered into it.
The speed with which firms have taken their targeted support journeys live is a testament to that approach in action. The regime went live on 6 April 2026, following the FCA Board making its final rules on 26 February and the authorisations gateway opening in March. By August, reporting in Professional Adviser based on a Freedom of Information response confirmed that firms had been granted authorisation across pensions, investment platforms and digital banking, with no applications rejected. At the time of writing, at least eight firms hold permission.
None of this has been easy, as we know very well from many conversations. Adjacent use cases, established procedures and existing policies have all presented roadblocks as firms have worked to get live. Yet in keeping with the FCA’s own approach of running rapid sprints and learning quickly, the market has moved at what should genuinely be seen as record pace.
There are more firms still to come, and what is already encouraging is the range of use cases emerging alongside early signs of how rapidly firms are learning and, importantly, sharing with one another. We saw this first hand at our recent In Targeted Support We Trust? event, where firms were strikingly open about the opportunity, and arguably the need, for collaboration and shared best practice. The prize is that the industry can be seen as being on the customer’s side.
But how do we know it’s working?
One of the things we touched on at that event was the role of evidence and benchmarking in assessing how well firms are doing. More precisely, how well consumers feel firms are doing.
Through Consumer Duty we already have a version of this embedded into business models. But when it comes to trust specifically, there is no one size fits all model for firms to assess the effectiveness of their journeys. In our view, that is the next phase: Build trust signals into targeted support journeys, personalised guidance and digital experiences, so we can measure the value created beyond the transaction.
We are approaching this in three ways.
We are continuing to convene the industry to talk about it, because these questions are not ones any single firm can answer alone.
We are defining and deploying a trust framework, drawing on our experience of delivering personalised guidance to hundreds of thousands of people across multiple firms. The framework considers markers ranging from increased confidence, through loyalty measures and the detection of vulnerability, all the way to product conversion.
We are partnering with third parties who have a track record in raising standards, such as accreditation work with Fairer Finance. Another example is our work with Plain Numbers on making numbers genuinely accessible, since so many of these journeys still culminate in a table of figures presented to someone who was never given the tools to read it.
What matters most in all of this is that a non conversion is not seen as a failure.The ability to see what is building trust however is key and will prove more important to firms over the long term than the ability to see what is converting into a product sale. You want customers to come back. You want to retain them, and you want to generate lifetime value, and the only way that happens is through repeated value exchanges.
Targeted support is simply another opportunity for a value exchange, delivered in a way that is seen as supportive of someone’s outcomes rather than designed to sell them a product. The key is to measure the exchange and translate it into whether a customer trusts you or not.
