Fairer Finance and Sideways partner to design trust into UK fintech

A consumer ratings group and a behavioural design consultancy unite to help financial firms build trust in, not just measure it.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Tue, 27 October 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

Brightly lit modern control room with a curved white console, ergonomic black chairs, and a large video wall display, illuminated by natural light from expansive windows.

Consumer group and ratings provider Fairer Finance has formed a formal partnership with Sideways, a behavioural design consultancy, to help UK retail financial services firms diagnose and repair trust failures before they surface as regulatory sanctions, complaints, or customer attrition. The tie-up combines 12 years of Fairer Finance market data with Sideways's Seven Trust Signals design framework, and arrives as the UK's Consumer Duty regulation continues to raise the compliance bar for banks, insurers and lenders.

The partnership's centrepiece is a new accreditation scheme modelled loosely on a tiered quality mark. Unlike Fairer Finance's existing Customer Experience and Product ratings, which assess firms from the outside in, the accreditation is conducted with a firm's active participation, examining governance structures, management information dashboards, fair value assessments, and complaints trend data. The aim is to give firms a credible, externally verified proof point they can show regulators and retail customers alike.

An agentic diagnostic layer

Alongside the accreditation, the partnership is launching an AI-powered diagnostic tool built by Sideways co-founder and Agentic Lead Andrew Beckley. The tool audits customer-facing communications and touchpoints against the Seven Trust Signals framework in near real time, flagging trust-eroding patterns as they emerge rather than surfacing them in a periodic review. The shift from static snapshot to continuous signal is significant: in a regulatory environment where Consumer Duty obliges firms to evidence ongoing good customer outcomes, a live trust read has a different value proposition to a quarterly score.

James Daley, Managing Director of Fairer Finance, framed the urgency in structural terms: "In a world where AI begins to change the way consumers buy financial services products, there will be fewer places for firms to hide if they are delivering poor experiences at key customer moments."

Daljit Singh, co-founder of Sideways and previously founder of digital business account ANNA Money, was more direct about where trust typically breaks down: "Most organisations don't mean to break trust. Their systems do it for them."

Convergence angle: Consumer Duty meets agentic tooling

The partnership sits at an instructive intersection of regulatory compliance, behavioural design, and agentic AI. Consumer Duty, which came into full force in the UK in July 2023 and extended to closed-book products in July 2024, has effectively created a new demand category: firms now need continuous, evidenced monitoring of customer outcomes, not just point-in-time product comparisons. That requirement maps almost directly onto what agentic diagnostic tooling is structurally suited to deliver.

For capital allocators watching the UK fintech and regtech space, the pattern is worth noting. Regulatory step-changes have historically been reliable demand-creation events for compliance technology: the post-2008 wave of Basel III requirements turbocharged risk-data infrastructure spend; GDPR seeded a generation of consent-management platforms. Consumer Duty looks likely to perform a similar function for trust-measurement and behavioural-design tooling. Sideways and Fairer Finance are positioning early in what could become a contested accreditation and diagnostics market, with larger management consultancies and established regtech vendors likely to develop competing offerings as enforcement activity under Consumer Duty accumulates.

The partnership's innovation layer, helping firms take new products to market with trust designed in from the outset rather than tested for retrospectively, points at a longer-term ambition: embedding into product development cycles, not just compliance reviews. In insurance, where the release notes that customers are "trusting a promise they hope never to use," that upstream design role could prove particularly durable. Whether the Sideways-Fairer Finance accreditation achieves the authority of a genuinely hard-won quality mark, or remains one signal among many, will depend on how actively the FCA references independent accreditation in its Consumer Duty supervisory communications in the periods ahead.