If you run a small FCA-regulated firm, you have probably circled this question more than once: do we need a compliance consultant, a compliance platform, or both? It tends to get asked as if the two were rivals. They aren't. They do different jobs, and in our experience most of the wasted compliance spend in small firms comes from paying one to do the other's job. Here is the distinction, as plainly as we can put it.
What a good consultant is genuinely for
A good consultant sells judgement. That is the product, and when you need it, nothing else will do.
You need judgement for an authorisation application, where the FCA's questions are searching and how you present your business model matters. You need it for a variation of permission, where getting the scope wrong can cost you months. You need it when something has gone wrong — a breach that might be notifiable, a complaint that has turned serious, remediation the regulator is watching — and you want a person who has seen this before and can tell you, from experience, what good looks like.
You also need it for the awkward, firm-specific questions. Does this new product line change our regulatory position? Is this financial promotion defensible? Should we be worried about this letter? A rulebook cannot answer those for your particular firm. An experienced person can.
None of that can be automated, and we won't pretend otherwise.
What a retainer often becomes
Here is the uncomfortable part — and it is not an attack on consultants, because many of them would say the same thing privately.
A typical retainer for a small firm runs somewhere between £400 and £1,500 a month. Ask what that money buys in a normal month — not the month something goes wrong, an ordinary one — and the answer is usually this: registers updated, deadlines chased, a board report formatted, a reminder that a return is due. Diligent, useful work. But it is system-of-record work, not judgement work.
That is the mismatch. You are paying judgement rates for record-keeping. Nobody engineered it; when a firm has no system of its own, someone has to be the system, and the retainer quietly becomes it. The judgement you originally hired — the thing genuinely worth those rates — gets called on a handful of times a year, while the monthly fee pays for admin.
What a platform is for
A platform is the system of record. Its job is the recording layer: registers with named owners and due dates, SM&CR records that stay current, reminders that go out without anyone having to remember to send them, RegData return deadlines tracked in one place, and a board-ready report generated from the evidence rather than assembled by hand the night before.
Software is simply better at this than a person. It does not forget a date, does not go on holiday the week a return is due, and produces the same report the same way every time. It is also far cheaper. Fenchurch One starts at £95 a month, flat, for the whole firm — the recording layer handled for less than a single hour of most consultants' time. For context, platforms offering anything comparable start at over £1,000 a month.
The honest hybrid
Many of the best-run small firms we see do both, deliberately.
The platform is the system of record. The registers live there, the deadlines live there, the evidence accumulates there, and the board report comes from there. The consultant moves to being on call: a few hours when there is an application to make, a judgement call to take, or a problem to remediate. You pay them for the thing they are genuinely good at, and you stop paying them to maintain a spreadsheet.
In practice, this combination usually costs less than the old retainer alone. And both sides get a better deal. The firm gets records that are always current. The consultant, when called in, walks into clean registers and a clear picture rather than a shoebox — which makes their hours count for more too.
When you don't need us
Honesty cuts both ways. If you are a larger firm with a full second-line compliance function and an enterprise GRC platform already in place, Fenchurch One is lighter than you need — and we will tell you so rather than sell to you anyway. We built it for the small firms the big tools forgot, where compliance is one person's third job. If that is not you, keep what you have.
The question to ask
Strip the debate down and it comes to one question:
Who maintains your evidence, and what does that cost per month?
If the answer is a person charging judgement rates for record-keeping, you are overpaying. If the answer is nobody, you have a different problem. Either way, the recording layer is the cheap part to fix — and fixing it makes every other compliance decision, including whether and how to use a consultant, easier to take.