WH Ireland adopts MARS to strengthen customer vulnerability support and Consumer Duty reporting

11 August 2026

WH Ireland, the privately-owned wealth management and financial planning firm, has selected the MorganAsh Resilience System (MARS) to enhance managing customer vulnerability across its retail client base – giving relationship managers additional tools for identifying vulnerable clients more consistently, and providing the firm with the structured data needed to monitor and assess its compliance with its Consumer Duty obligations.

Consumer Duty requires firms to go far beyond simply identifying vulnerable clients – they must act to deliver good client outcomes for all retail customers, while evidencing and reporting them at board level. WH Ireland recognised the importance of a holistic, firm-wide approach to vulnerability. MARS offers a streamlined approach to managing Consumer Duty objectives with a standardised Resilience Rating that will be available across the whole client book, generating consistent management information which is auditable by regulators and reportable to the board.

Steve Hutchings, Head of Advice Quality and Competence at WH Ireland, said:

“Consumer Duty is not a box-ticking exercise — it demands that firms genuinely understand which of their clients may be vulnerable and that they can evidence how they have responded. MARS gives our advisers the additional structure needed to have those conversations properly, and gives our compliance and senior management teams further resources needed to demonstrate we are delivering good outcomes at scale.”

Robert Race, Joint Deputy Head of Wealth Management at WH Ireland, added:

“A major benefit of implementing MARS will be the increased knowledge and understanding we have of our clients. Having this information localised in MARS will help individual advisers provide an even more personalised service to our clients.

MARS will be integrated into WH Ireland's adviser workflows to support clients' onboarding, periodic reviews, and trigger events such as bereavement, health changes, or significant life events. The MARS platform tracks Resilience Ratings over time, flags deterioration requiring proactive intervention and produces the segmented management information needed for annual Consumer Duty board reporting.

Andrew Gething, Managing Director of MorganAsh, said:

“Firms often tell us they want to do the right thing by vulnerable clients – but without good data, they simply can’t know whether they are succeeding. MARS gives wealth managers a defensible, scalable way to capture vulnerability information, act on it promptly and report on it clearly. WH Ireland’s adoption demonstrates exactly the kind of commitment to data quality that Consumer Duty demands.”

MorganAsh is a specialist in Consumer Duty and customer vulnerability. The firm launched its multi-award-winning MARS platform to help firms understand and monitor vulnerable customers and deliver good outcomes – as required by Consumer Duty. It is currently in use across financial services and the utilities sector and meets the system requirements set out in recent guidance from the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII).

To find out more about MARS or access a free trial, visit: morganash.com/mars or phone: 0330 159 8162. To learn more about WH Ireland, please visit: whirelandplc.com or phone: 0161 832 2174.