Many claimant firms have invested heavily in marketing, customer acquisition and infrastructure, and those investments still need to generate returns. The FCA’s recent joint FCA/SRA taskforce update reinforces that the claimant market remains highly active, confirming interventions in more than 900 misleading motor finance adverts and helping over 28,000 consumers leave claims management contracts without charge.

Commission disclosure may have dominated the headlines, but it should not be mistaken for the end of the story. The FCA’s Claims Management Market Study highlights aggressive marketing, speculative claims and commercial pressures that encourage volume over consumer outcomes. It also examines how private equity influences the growth strategies of some claims management companies, reinforcing the incentive to keep looking for new opportunities.

Bott & Co’s own motor finance claims information already highlights allegations beyond hidden commission, including affordability, failures to explain agreements properly, pressure selling and unsuitable finance. Some of these allegations may fail, but defending large volumes of claims is still costly, disruptive and time-consuming. That alone should give lenders and brokers reason to look beyond commission disclosure.

Future scrutiny is likely to focus less on whether disclosure was present and more on whether customers understood what they were buying.

Lenders have spent months asking, “Did we disclose commission properly?” It is an important question, but not the only one. A compliant document does not automatically prove a compliant customer journey. Where standards fall short, lenders often carry the consequences of poor broker conduct. Customers may have been rushed, affordability inadequately assessed or agreements poorly understood. That is where Consumer Duty changes the conversation. You have the data – now analyse it, because claimant firms are already doing the same. Now is the time to prevent tomorrow’s claims, not simply defend yesterday’s.

Challenge today’s sales journey now, because relying on every firm in the chain to manage its own risks has never been a compliance strategy. The Court of Appeal’s decision in Angel v Black Horse confirmed that large numbers of similar claims can proceed together using omnibus claim forms. Henderson Chambers believes this is likely to encourage claimant lawyers and litigation funders to pursue similar consumer claims on a much larger scale.

If claimant firms identify the next wave of allegations, pursuing them at scale has just become easier.