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Product Governance Design and Distribution Obligations Consumer Duty

DDO made easy - a complete product monitoring and compliance solution


How can Skyjed help organisations automate and uplift their compliance and product monitoring obligations or even better to know the health and performance of their products?  Is it important to know what the greatest risks are and/or the greatest growth opportunities?

Whilst the Design & Distribution Obligations (DDO) implementation deadline has come and gone this does not mean it's a one-off box ticking exercise. Product governance and compliance is an ongoing iterative process.  It's  vital that organisations continually invest in improvements to their framework and this should extend to having the right tools in place, especially when you can minimise risk, maximise product trust opportunities and automate the manual and laborious tasks of your ongoing DDO compliance so your teams have more time to focus on business growth.

In this blog, I will detail how you can benefit from Skyjed's key feature set to make DDO or Consumer Duty (as example use cases) easy for your organisation so that you can automate and uplift your product monitoring and compliance health.

Let's first start with a simple and effective one-minute video example of how the Skyjed platform can enable your organisation to be more effective and strategic in managing product obligations.  This also includes the ability for Issuers and Distributors to share and collect product information and monitoring data.

Skyjed DDO / Consumer Duty video (one minute)

Second, you can also download our guide on How to comply with ASIC's Design and Distribution obligations for more information.

DDO Background

DDO or Consumer Duty has been designed to ensure that a customer-centric approach is embedded into every financial organisation as part of a Product Governance framework and to ensure the protection of consumers and product trust.  

Financial products need to be designed to meet the needs of each target market and ensure they are suitable.  They also need to be distributed in a targeted way.  Monitoring and reporting need to be in place to ensure that if products digress from the target market determination or design, financial organisations have a way to monitor this and take action.

Under DDO, financial organisations (product issuers) are required to create a Target Market Determination (TMDs) in relation to their financial products. In creating a TMD, issuers must consider the design of their products (including the key attributes) and determine an appropriate target market for the product by ensuring that the key attributes of the product are likely to be consistent with the likely objectives, including the financial situation and needs of the target market.

Consumer Duty has similar provisions and requirements to the Design and Distribution Obligations.

With several features designed to save time and enable your teams to work smarter Skyjed’s solution meets all your product governance and management of DDO or Consumer Duty including target market design and monitoring, governance reporting, automated reminders and planning, automated triggers for monitoring your TMDs and actions/risks management plus more. 

Here's what some of our financial customers are saying about Skyjed

GSB

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Skyjed's DDO Tool Kit

1. How to develop a Target Market Determination and what to cover.

     What goes in a TMD?

  • Target market description
  • Distribution conditions
  • Product Review Triggers
  • Product Review Frequency
  • Distribution information

Develop your TMD in the platform - share, review and approve/publish. This can be shared internally to your organisation, exported or shared electronically within the platform to your Distributors with version control and record keeping.

tmd

 

Example export of your TMD in a branded document template or Word/PDF

tmd1

 

2. Design and Distribution Obligations Checklist

Product governance and oversight ensures that your customers' interests are of central importance throughout your product lifecycle decisions. We have designed a Chief Product Officer's governance checklist for setting out the processes and controls that help you design propositions and products that customers value.

3. Skyjed’s DDO and TMD Masterclass Series.

Checkout Skyjed’s Masterclass series including:

  • Creating Best Practise Target Market Determinations
  • Solving product distribution challenges for DDO

CEO Leica Ison and Senior Customer Success Manager Sue Sivam-Raja share best practice learnings on how to create Target Market Determinations to ensure they are effective and compliant. Insights include multiple industry roundtables on DDO and how to avoid common TMD mistakes, eliminate ambiguous or broad qualification criteria, and set triggers and thresholds for effective TMD management. 

4. Skyjed's Automated Review Triggers workflow solution

Product monitoring trigger workflowworkflowsmalls are a way to monitor the strategic or risk events and objectives in your product and will significantly improve your product lifecycle management including early warnings for strategic events including TMD risks, or other important growth levers, competitive intelligence,  product performance, and non-financial metrics.

Skyjed’s platform can automate triggers in a workflow to make the entire product management process faster, strategic, and more efficient.   Triggers are ideal for customer complaints, sales data, cancellations, margin decline, market share decline, and so on.  

Review Triggers provide advanced warning that you need to adjust your product strategy and goals.  We recommend you set triggers around areas like a number of customer complaints, changes in sales volume, and changes in product cancellations as a minimum for example. 

 5. Automated Governance and Risk Reporting Dashboards

Skyjed comes complete with a number of automated Governance and Risk Dashboards including product review triggers and product monitoring metrics, TMD reviews etc.  Our dashboards enable a deep dive of each of the reported metrics. We can also customise reporting and will shortly have greater report builder features. 

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 7.39.00 pm

ddo

Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCAs) Consumer Duty is similar to Australia’s DDO

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulates the financial services industry in the UK. Its role includes protecting consumers, keeping the industry stable, and promoting healthy competition between financial service providers.

Consumer Duty is made up of an overarching principle and new rules will need to be followed. It will mean that consumers should receive communications they can understand, products and services that meet their needs and offer fair value, and they get the customer support they need when they need it.

Consumer Duty will include requirements for organisations to:

  • end rip-off charges and fees
  • make it as easy to switch or cancel products as it was to take them out in the first place
  • provide helpful and accessible customer support, not making people wait so long for an answer that they give up
  • provide timely and clear information that people can understand about products and services so consumers can make good financial decisions, rather than burying key information in lengthy terms and conditions that few have the time to read
  • provide products and services that are right for their customers
  • focus on the real and diverse needs of their customers, including those in vulnerable circumstances, at every stage and in each interaction

The Consumer Duty represents the biggest change to the retail market and will lead to material changes in the way in which organisations will have to think about conducting their business with retail customers.

For new and existing products or services that are open to sale or renewal, the rules will come into force on 31 July 2023. For closed products or services, the rules come into force on 31 July 2024.

The implementation of Consumer Duty will require firms to ensure they implement product governance frameworks and effective monitoring tools for the ongoing design, monitoring and review of products and ensuring they meet the obligations required to achieve consumer protection across financial services.  

Getting product lifecycle management and governance right with the right tools is critical to success.

To get a glimpse of Skyjed contact us for a demo or no obligation consultation or Skyjed now comes with a free Starter Tier  (with no payment details needed or expiry timeframe) and an array of starter features to get you started including:  

  • A selection of popular ready-to-start product design and product review templates such as Lean Canvas, Launch Ready Review, Product Strategy & Growth, Annual Product Reviews, and more.  
  • Skyjed's templates guide you every step of the way or you can easily customise your own templates in minutes to suit your business goals.  
  • Our AI-powered platform enables you to plan, design, monitor, and review your products with product health check scores, dashboards, and insights.  
  • Collaboration is so easy with your virtual team and includes automated review workflows, automated trigger workflows, actions and comments management, version control, record keeping, and more.  

The beauty of Skyjed is that it is flexible to suit your goals whilst enabling product excellence and more time to spend on growth. 

When you sign up to Skyjed on any of our tiers, you get access to a selection of best practice Product Design and Audit Templates.  These templates have been created using input from product leaders around the world and are designed to help you meet your specific business goals whilst helping you drive towards product success. 

Deriving a Product Health Check score is super easy in Skyjed. 

As you conduct your product reviews using any of our Audit templates, Skyjed’s powerful AI engine will produce a health check score out of 100 as well as insights into where you have opportunities for growth and areas of risk to mitigate. 

Measure your product health check scores easily with our Audit Templates and get started today!   

About Skyjed   

Skyjed is an AI-powered digital product lifecycle management and governance SaaS platform that acts as the single source of truth for product design, health, performance, and governance.    

Skyjed is an ISO-27001 accredited solution.   It is designed to drive growth and enable product teams to strategically design and monitor products with automation smarts and faster insights to make data-driven decisions with confidence.   

Skyjed’s commitment to innovation and our customers has been rewarded with several industry recognitions including Technology of Year – Finalist in the UK Tech & Innovation Awards 2022, Finalist in the AFR Most Innovative Company 2022 and AFR Sustainability Awards 2022 and Regtech Female Founder of the Year 2021.   

Experience the unique features of Skyjed:   

  • AI-powered modern product lifecycle management and governance solution   
  • Flexible to achieve different business goals   
  • Pre-built design, monitoring, and review templates or easily build your own   
  • Automated workflow triggers so you can identify opportunities as they emerge or monitor risks before they take hold   
  • Access boardroom-ready product governance and product insight reports and dashboards   
  • Team collaboration with review and approval workflows, actions & comments management, version control, and record keeping   
  • Integrated workspace with product planning and scheduler capability  

Contact us to learn more