Fairer Finance, the independent consumer group and ratings and research business, and Sideways, the trust-focused behavioural design consultancy, today announce a formal partnership to help retail financial services firms, including banks, insurers and lenders, identify where they are losing customer trust, and fix it before it shows up as a complaint, a regulatory finding, or a customer who simply leaves.
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Fairer Finance brings 12 years of market data and ratings, as well as experience supporting many of the UK’s largest financial services companies to deliver better customer outcomes.
Sideways is a behavioural design practice co-founded by Daljit Singh, who built ANNA Money to over 100,000 customers. His co-founders are Nicolas Roope, who led Poke’s UBS rebrand with Publicis in the wake of the financial crisis, and Andrew Beckley, who brings 24 years in financial services, examining the culture, processes and user experience that underpin customer trust.
A new accreditation, built around Consumer Duty
The partnership introduces a Michelin-star-style accreditation, sitting alongside Fairer Finance’s existing Customer Experience and Product ratings rather than replacing them. Whilst ratings provide a view of a firm from the outside in, accreditations are carried out with the participation and cooperation of the firm – taking a deep dive into governance, MI dashboards, fair value assessments, complaints trend analysis and other company data. The accreditation will provide external reassurance for companies that they are compliant with the Consumer Duty whilst also giving them a proof point to share with consumers.
An agentic diagnostic tool
The partnership is also launching an AI-powered tool, built by Sideways co-founder and Agentic Lead Andrew Beckley, that checks customer-facing communications and touchpoints against Sideways’s Seven Trust Signals and flags trust-eroding patterns as they happen, giving firms an ongoing read on trust rather than a single static score.
James Daley, Managing Director of Fairer Finance, said: “Every company knows the importance of trust. It is at the core of customer retention. But even with the best intentions, it can often be hard to see where it is leaking out, and how to fix it quickly. 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. Our partnership with Sideways allows us to diagnose and fix problems quicker – and then reflect the real customer experience back to prospective customers through our new accreditation scheme. We want that to be something meaningful that is hard won and a genuine mark of quality.”
Daljit Singh, co-founder of Sideways, said: “Most organisations don’t mean to break trust. Their systems do it for them. Fairer Finance can tell a firm what customers believe about its culture, and can then identify the strengths and weaknesses in their products and governance. We can tell them why trust is breaking down, and what to do about it. Together that’s a much harder thing to argue with.”
The partnership will also work as an innovation layer for financial services, helping firms take new ideas and strategy to market far faster as AI changes how customers choose and buy. Fairer Finance brings its expertise on the Consumer Duty and its regular engagement with regulators, government and industry bodies, while Sideways brings the design and strategy to turn that understanding into new products and services. In areas like insurance, where people are trusting a promise they hope never to use, trust has to be in the DNA of every decision, and the two firms will help build it in from the start rather than test for it afterwards.
“The pace of change means firms can’t wait for trust problems to show up in the data,” said Singh. “Together we can help them get better ideas to market quickly, with trust designed in from the first decision.”