Nick Thorp
Founder, Proven Duty
Why I'm building Proven Duty
Consumer Duty turned file reviews, outcomes monitoring, and vulnerability evidence into standing obligations — and much of that evidence still lives in spreadsheets and sampled folders. Proven Duty is the tool I kept describing in conversations with advisers: one that scores the files a firm already produces and makes the evidence exist, with a human signing off every output.
I'm building it in the open. The product's limitations are documented in plain language — including what the AI gets wrong — because a compliance tool that hides its weaknesses is worse than no tool at all.
What I've actually built
I claim expertise in exactly one thing: what it takes to build Consumer Duty compliance software. I built the scoring rubric Proven Duty uses — check by check, from the FCA's published rules and file-review findings — and testing it against real report wording taught me where files wobble: the evidence lines that go missing, the reasoning that reads fine but scores amber.
Every guide on this site comes out of that seat. The questions the product has to answer are the questions these guides answer — what a pass needs, what a flag looks like, and what the rules actually ask a file to show. It's the build log of the tool, written up as it goes.
How this site is written
I write the guides on this site. The rules they describe are tied to published FCA material — Handbook rules, FG21/1, thematic reviews — rather than memory or second-hand summaries.
The scoring rubric behind the product is derived from published FCA sources, checked against the regulator's own file-review findings, and version-controlled: no change ships without human review. That process — including what we verify and what we haven't yet proven — is documented on the AI transparency page.
What Proven Duty is not
Proven Duty is a compliance monitoring tool. It does not constitute legal or regulatory advice, it is not endorsed by the Financial Conduct Authority, and it does not replace a firm's own judgement: the tool flags, you decide.