Fair-treatment rules that shape what you can promise

A growth marketer at a BNPL lender has a retargetingretargetingShowing ads to users who have previously visited your site or interacted with your brand, to bring them back and drive conversion.View full definition → list of 60,000 abandoned checkouts from the last 30 days. Enriched against the loan book, about 4,000 of those people turn out to be behind on an instalment already. Leaving them in lifts conversion, because people who lean on instalment credit respond to instalment credit ads. Conduct rules are what turn that into a decision rather than an optimisation. Fair-treatment duties do not mainly police adjectives. They police who you reachreachThe number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.View full definition →, what you pay people to do, and what you tell them will happen afterwards.

Why "fair" is a legal standard, not a vibe

Two regimes carry most of the weight.

UK Consumer Duty (in force for open products since 31 July 2023) requires firms to act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers across four outcomes: products and services, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support. Marketing lives inside consumer understanding, and inside the target market work that sits behind products and services. A firm can breach the Duty with an ad in which every individual sentence is accurate, if the overall impressionimpressionThe total number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, regardless of clicks. Each display counts as one impression, even to the same person.View full definition → leaves a customer wrong about cost, risk or obligation.

US UDAAP (unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices), enforced by the CFPB and the FTC under the FTC Act and Dodd-Frank, adds the word marketers underrate. "Abusive" covers taking unreasonable advantage of a consumer's lack of understanding, or of their inability to protect their own interests. That is a limit on targeting and on offer design, not on copy.

Neither regime asks about intent, and both treat omissions like statements. Whether an asset needed a named approver before it shipped is the foundations lesson's subject; the question here is what the asset is allowed to promise once someone is able to approve it.

Who the rules assume is reading

The FCA's guidance on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers (FG21/1, February 2021) sets out four drivers: poor health, life events such as bereavement or job loss, low financial resilience, and low capability. In the FCA's Financial Lives survey, around half of UK adults show at least one of those characteristics. Vulnerability is not a narrow segment at the edge of the funnelfunnelThe customer journey from awareness to purchase, typically Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, Action, with prospects narrowing at each stage.View full definition →, and it does not hold still: a customer who was resilient in March can be three weeks from a missed rent payment by June.

Wonga is the counter-example worth carrying around, because its problem was not hidden pricing. The representative APR was on the site, in the thousands of percent, and the ads sold speed. In October 2014 the FCA required Wonga to write off around £220 million of debt for roughly 330,000 customers whose loans should never have been made, because affordability had not been assessed properly. Disclosure did not rescue the promise. Selling a fast fix to people the product cannot work for is the failure, whatever the small print said. Wonga went into administration in 2018.

Targeting: the audience you can build is not the audience you should buy

Consumer Duty expects a firm to define a target market and show that distribution actually reaches it. Paid social optimisation pulls the other way, because it optimises for response, not for outcome. Two failure modes recur:

• A lookalike seed built from "highest revenue customers" on a product that earns late fees. The model learns to find people who miss payments. Nobody wrote a targeting rule for financially stressed shoppers; the algorithm inferred one from the seed.
• Retargeting and upsell flows that never suppress customers in arrears, on a payment plan, or flagged as vulnerable by servicing. The suppression list is a marketing artefact, and it is usually nobody's job until a regulator asks to see it.

The Klarna ruling of December 2020 shows a third mode: context. The ASA found a set of paid influencer posts irresponsible because they encouraged the use of BNPL credit to lift your mood during lockdown. Nothing in them was factually wrong. The problem was pairing credit with an emotional trigger for an audience skewed young. Afterpay's home market supplies the scale: ASIC's 2020 review of buy now pay later found roughly one in five users had missed a payment in the previous year, and a similar share said they had cut back on essentials, meals included, to pay instalments on time.

The working limit: where a segment is defined by a signal of financial stress (payday timing, arrears history, repeated small-basket instalment use, search terms about paying bills), you need a reason it serves that customer, not only a reason it converts.

Incentives and the outcomes you say the product produces

Incentives change what a promise means. A referral bonus that pays on the friend's first purchase buys volume, including volume from a friend who did not need credit. Spend thresholds ("free delivery over £60") inside an instalment checkout push the basket above what the customer arrived intending to spend. Retail events built on deferred payment, Afterpay Day being the obvious one, make the fairness question not whether the discount is real but whether the pace of spending is one the customer can carry.

Promised outcomes have a tighter boundary than most briefs assume. "Approval in 60 seconds" describes a process you control and can evidence. "Improve your credit score" describes an outcome you do not control, and for the customer who misses an instalment it describes the opposite of what happens. Klarna began sharing UK BNPL data with Experian and TransUnion in June 2022, which retired the old reassurance that instalment use is invisible to lenders. That is the edge case teams miss: the product changed, the rules did not, and every evergreen asset saying "no effect on your credit file" became a fair-treatment problem overnight. Someone has to own the sweep of live creative when a product term moves, and the pre-launch review a sibling lesson walks through will not catch it, because the asset already shipped.

Promises that need evidence in the file or deletion from the brief:

• anything about credit scores or credit files
• "no fees" on a product that charges a late fee
• any implication that instalments are not borrowing
• any suggestion that a limit increase reflects the customer's financial health rather than their repayment record

What this means for marketing teams day to day

Practical habits:

• Draft the risk disclosure and the suppression list before the hero copy, not after.
• Test comprehension with real users. Consumer Duty expects evidence that customers understood, not a lawyer's opinion. Second-order effect: a test showing 35% misread the fee, followed by a campaign that shipped anyway, is now evidence against you. Decide in advance that you will act on the result.
• Write the content limits into influencer contracts, not just the disclosure wording: no credit as mood repair, no credit as the answer to a household bill.
• Ask the finance question at brief stage. What share of this product's revenue comes from late fees or penalty pricing? If it is material, targeting and incentive design both need a second reviewer, because growth and harm are being measured by the same number.

For a primary source, the FCA's own guidance is worth bookmarking: FCA Consumer Duty guidance.

Key Takeaways

• "Technically true" is not the bar. Consumer Duty and UDAAP both test the outcome a customer ends up with, and UDAAP's "abusive" limb reaches offer design and targeting, not only copy.
• Around half of UK adults show a characteristic of vulnerability in the FCA's own survey, and the set changes month to month, so fairness has to be built into the default campaign rather than a special path.
• Wonga shows that disclosure does not rescue an unsuitable promise: pricing was published, and the FCA still required around £220 million of debt to be written off for roughly 330,000 customers over affordability.
• Targeting fails quietly. A lookalike seeded on late-fee revenue finds financially stressed people without anyone writing that rule, and upsell flows that skip arrears suppression treat struggling customers as prospects.
• Incentives and product changes both break existing promises: spend thresholds inside instalment checkouts move the basket, and Klarna's 2022 move to credit reporting made "invisible to lenders" claims wrong overnight.