In-house legal teams at mainboard / premium-listed issuers carrying retail-eligible products under the Consumer Duty are increasingly using AI to draft scope opinions on the boundary between in-scope retail-customer products and out-of-scope group-insurance, large-risk, and reinsurance arrangements, and to validate FSMA-statute citations in board papers and Part 6 disclosure drafting. The work product feeds into prospectus drafting, listing-rule compliance memos, and director attestations.
Two frontier AI models tested by the RLB Specialist Panel produced 2 substantive failures on this regulation under audit conditions. The failure classes recorded are: Misstated Statutory Architecture, Reversed the PRIN 2A Group-Insurance Exclusion. Questions were prepared by the RLB Specialist Panel based on real practical AI usage in the workflows the respective audience uses AI for, and each finding is bound to verbatim regulator-issued source text held as primary substrate.
The Consumer Duty (PS22/9 introducing Principle 12 and PRIN 2A, in force for open products from 31 July 2023 and for closed products from 31 July 2024) is the central retail-conduct regime the FCA now uses to grade firm behaviour, and the failure modes seen here all land inside the day-to-day work product that mainboard-issuer legal teams sign off on.
For mainboard / premium-listed issuer legal teams, the operational consequence is direct. Prospectus drafting, listing-rule compliance memos, board legal opinions, and director attestations on Consumer Duty applicability all rest on accurate PRIN 2A scope framing and statutory-architecture citation. A defect imported from AI work product surfaces on listing-rule review or audit-committee challenge, and the in-house function carries the professional exposure.
Citation IDs for the findings in this brief: RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q002-Sonnet46, RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q018-Opus47. Each citation links to the per-finding record, the AI subject answer, and the regulator-issued substrate excerpt the answer was tested against. The RLB Specialist Panel maintains an audit-traceable record of which model produced which answer, against which substrate passage, and the binding is what makes the finding referenceable in firm work product and in supervisory correspondence.
The findings below are the ones that mainboard-issuer legal teams working under the Consumer Duty are most likely to encounter in the AI tools they already use, and the briefing sections that follow read each finding against the regulator-issued text.
This is the consolidated view of findings. Click the Citation IDs or 'see details →' on any item for the full details for each finding.
Mainboard / Premium-Listed Issuers legal teams advising the board on Consumer Duty applicability across retail-facing product lines need both FSMA 2000 and FSMA 2023 acknowledged. The model's silent omission of FSMA 2023, if carried into a board-paper authority section, leaves an incomplete legal foundation that may be challenged in regulatory or disclosure correspondence.
Mainboard / Premium-Listed Issuers legal teams advising on the application of the Consumer Duty across the group's insurance distribution business need the PRIN 2A.1.8R exclusion preserved. The model's reversal would, if adopted in a scope opinion, drive the group to apply Duty obligations to excluded activities and inflate compliance cost across multiple subsidiaries.
Every finding on this page compares an AI subject's account of the rule against the regulator's verbatim text from the regulator's own portal. Both are linked. Each delta, its root causes, and impact analysis are documented and published with immutable Citation IDs.