Noxia · Field Notes
What we found when we checked.
Most AI writing about financial services is written by people selling AI to financial services, and it shows. These are the notes we take when we go and look. Every number names its source and its date, and where the source is a vendor selling the answer, we say so.
What we found
One in three UK businesses now use AI. One in ten use it seriously.
The ONS asked 38,637 businesses in June 2026. 35% use some AI. 10% use it extensively. Most of the gap between those two numbers is a licence somebody bought.
Advice & compliance
18 of 45 citations did not exist. What a court said about AI drafting.
Two cases, one Divisional Court, £2,000 in wasted costs, four referrals to regulators — and one sentence about professional duty that applies to every firm that lets a machine draft.
Supplier checks
Seven million people have until November to prove who they are.
Companies House estimates 6 to 7 million directors and controllers must verify by mid-November 2026. It is an offence to act as a director without doing so. Here is what changes for anyone who checks suppliers.
Product compliance
You may not need the UKCA mark at all. What the CE decision covers.
For over twenty product types Great Britain now accepts CE marking indefinitely. Seven areas are excluded. The government says so on one page, and the page keeps being updated.
Lettings
Four months into the Renters’ Rights Act: the clocks an agent keeps.
Section 21 went on 1 May 2026 for 11 million renters. What replaced it is a set of clocks — rent notices, pet requests, registration, ombudsman — and a fine of up to £40,000 for missing one.
Advice & compliance
26% of UK adults trust ChatGPT for financial advice. The FCA counted.
The FCA surveyed 5,026 adults in April 2026. A quarter trust a general-purpose chatbot for financial advice, mostly unaware there is no recourse. One in five would let AI act for them.
Mortgage broking
Half of what brokers send lenders is wrong first time. Here is where the hours go.
Nivo talked to 70+ specialist lenders and brokers. Only half of submitted information was right first time. The rest is rework nobody bills for.
Advice & compliance
Can an IFA use AI to write suitability reports without breaching Consumer Duty?
Vendors say a suitability report takes four to six hours. They are selling the fix. Here is what has to be true before an AI-drafted report is defensible.
What agents can do
AI agents now beat humans at desktop tasks. They still finish 30% of real work.
86.1% on a desktop benchmark, above the human baseline. 30% on a simulated company. Both numbers are true and the distance between them is the buying decision.
Enquiries
Do the arithmetic on your unanswered phone before you buy anything.
Nobody can tell you what a missed call costs. You can, in five minutes, with four numbers you already have — and the answer decides whether to buy anything at all.
Buying AI
Per-minute AI pricing charges you for the thing working.
A price that rises with volume charges you for success. Worse, it makes the quote uncomparable against the only alternative you were seriously considering — a person.
Advice & compliance
In a regulated firm, the audit trail is the product.
An unregulated business buys the output. You are buying the ability to explain the output eighteen months later to someone who is not impressed.
What we found
We checked five AI statistics we were about to publish. Three had no source.
One of them was on our own homepage, credited to Gartner. Gartner never published it. Here is what happened when we actually went and looked.
Getting started
What to automate first in an advice firm — and what to never automate.
Two questions decide it: if it is wrong, can you undo it, and would you notice? Everything else is detail.
Outbound
Does AI-written outreach work? 31 million emails say something uncomfortable.
Personalisation works. Automation of the writing does not, quite. And most of your recipients can tell — which is the finding nobody quotes.
Being found
Your firm may be invisible to ChatGPT. Here is how to check in ten minutes.
Crawlability scored 9.5/10 as a citation factor — ahead of every content signal. Plenty of adviser sites fail at that first hurdle without anyone knowing.
Appointments
The cheapest fix for missed appointments is one line in a text message.
Two randomised trials at a London NHS trust found that adding the cost of the appointment to the reminder text cut no-shows by roughly a quarter. Nothing was installed.
Lettings
Nobody answers the phone after six, and your customers already know.
Someone rang 3,047 UK property firms between six and nine in the evening. 94.1% of those calls went unanswered. The interesting part is who published it, and why that matters.
What we found
Twenty-six machinery standards stop counting on the same day.
We read all thirteen consolidated lists in one go. Only 65 cessation dates are still ahead — and 26 of them are the same date.