In full
Consumer Duty rewards teams who treated traceability as an architectural concern from day one, not a reporting feature added before an inspection.
The Fourths · Engineering for regulated industries
Blog / Compliance Engineering
Consumer Duty at the code level: what it actually requires.
Consumer Duty reads like policy. Most of it is a set of engineering requirements waiting to be written down.
Compliance Engineering · 10 min read · May 2026
The short version
What does "good outcomes" mean technically?
It means you can reconstruct, after the fact, what a customer saw, what they were told, and why a decision went the way it did.
What has to exist in the code?
Versioned templates for every customer communication, an immutable record of each affordability decision, and an audit layer you can query for a sample.
Can it be retrofitted?
Painfully. Designing for traceability from the first migration is routine; bolting it on before an inspection is not.
