SM Advice has launched a multilingual social media content service.
The offering enables advisers and firms, to effectively engage with the UK’s diverse communities by creating, branding, and posting social media content in multiple languages while ensuring full compliance with Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulations.
The solution has more than 1,000 languages (including many local dialects), allowing advisers to connect authentically with these underserved communities, encouraging individuals to reach out so they receive clear and accessible financial information.
The multilingual social media service is designed to streamline and cover the entire process, from creating content, branding the content, posting it and ensuring compliance (including directly with network approval teams where required) at an affordable price point.
Aligning with Consumer Duty
The FCA’s Consumer Duty requires firms to act in the best interests of consumers, including providing clear and effective communication.
By offering social media content in multiple languages, SM Advice aims to help advisers meet these requirements, where they have potential clients, prospects or introducers within this segment of the population, by ensuring that financial promotions are fair, clear, and not misleading.
Setul Mehta, founder at SM Advice, (pictured) said: “As advisers and firms seek to expand their reach and the industry and regulator wants to do more to support underserved under reached communities, our service provides an end-to-end solution that ensures not only regulatory standards but allows advisers to engage with multilingual audiences in a meaningful way.”
Johnny Timpson OBE, said: “Both as a financial inclusion commissioner and chairman of an insurance brokerage serving consumers for whom English is not necessarily their first language, embracing innovative solutions that improves consumer financial inclusion and resilience by enhancing client access and engagement in underserved markets is essential.
“SM Advice’s multilingual social media service exemplifies this approach, leaving no client behind by promoting not just inclusivity but further demonstrating that Consumer Duty isn’t about standing still, it’s about evolving and embedding the right practices continually.”
Bijo Kurian, director of the Kurians Financial Consultants, said: “Utilising SM Advice’s foreign language service, has enabled clients to reach out starting form a place of comfort and understanding – the value and support needed to those where English may not be a first language exists, and I’m delighted we’ve found a way to help.”
Keith Richards, CEO of the Consumer Duty Alliance, said: “Clear, accessible communication is at the heart of Consumer Duty.
“Financial advice should be inclusive, and language should never be a barrier to understanding.
“By helping advisers engage diverse communities in their native languages, solutions such as this support consumers to be communicated to fairly and consistently.”
Mehta added: “Through my wider industry roles, I have long advocated not just the reduction of the advice gap but for reducing financial exclusion by supporting underserved communities in accessing advice.
“This service removes one more barrier by ensuring clear, accessible communication — aligning with Consumer Duty principles, particularly around consumer understanding and reducing the risk of misinterpretation while complimenting the FCA’s broader efforts to ensure equal access to financial information.”