VesperAI delivers FCA-regulated investment guidance to the 23 million UK adults who have never received a professional recommendation — at the cost of a streaming subscription.
"Only 9% of UK adults take financial advice over any two-year window. There are now only 28,000 financial advisers — down from 230,000 in 1990."
Mark Duckworth · Group CEO, Schroders Personal Wealth
Investment Association EnTech Global Conference · London, March 2026
The advice gap is not a consumer choice. It is a structural failure of regulation and pricing. The FCA has formally acknowledged this — and created the mechanism to fix it.
FCA Policy Statement PS25/22 created Targeted Support — a new regulated category live from 6 April 2026. For the first time, authorised firms can deliver personalised investment suggestions without conducting individualised suitability assessments. VesperAI is built from the ground up for this regime.
Between generic guidance and full personal advice sits a new regulated category that changes everything for mass-market investing. Vesper's FCA authorisation application is in progress — we are positioned to be among the first firms operating under this permission.
VesperAI is not a chatbot.
It is a compliance-first ETF guidance engine
with a conversational interface.
All investment scores, segment assignments, and ready-made suggestions are produced by a deterministic rules engine — not by AI. Anthropic Claude generates only the natural language explanations. The result is a PS25/22-compliant system that cannot hallucinate, cannot give personal advice, and is fully auditable end-to-end.
A 7-question bounded-choice dialogue. Consumers select from fixed options at every turn. No free-text input. No NLP. Every path pre-defined and FCA-documented.
5-factor composite model: 12M momentum, 3M momentum, quality (Sharpe), volatility-inverted, dividend yield. Scores recalculated quarterly from live market data. SMF16 sign-off required.
Every session produces an FCA-compliant disclosure document: segment rationale, ETF allocation, mandatory Consumer Duty disclosures, and a capital-at-risk statement. Emailed to the consumer.
High-interest debt check at Turn 4: session halts, MoneyHelper link provided. Vulnerability pathway at Turn 7: profiling stops, signposting only. Both are deterministic — no AI decision-making.
Every session logged in real time: 17-field JSONL schema, unique Session ID, ISO 8601 timestamps, every turn recorded. Available for FCA inspection on request.
18-check automated ruleset runs on every session: 10 deterministic checks + 8 AI-assisted checks. HIGH severity findings escalate to SMF16 before the durable medium is issued.
All eight ETFs are LSE-listed, UCITS-compliant, and available through mainstream UK investment platforms. The 5-factor composite scoring model is independently consistent with published multi-factor research from Research Affiliates and Asness, Frazzini & Pedersen (2019).
Data: Yahoo Finance · Period: 21 March 2025 – 20 March 2026 · Risk-free rate: 4.5% p.a. · Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Capital at risk.
VesperAI's 18-check Compliance Monitor runs automatically on every session — before the durable medium is issued. 10 deterministic checks verify the structural integrity of each journey. 8 AI-assisted checks assess tone, language, and compliance boundary.
Deterministic rules engine. 18-check Compliance Monitor. SYSC 9 audit logging on every session. Bounded-choice dialogue prevents free-text AI output.
Quarterly scoring model review and sign-off. Ad hoc material event review (VIX >40, ETF moves >20% in 30 days). Kill-switch authority. Compliance Officer (CF10) from Month 4.
Annual Consumer Duty audit by qualified third-party reviewer. Ongoing FCA supervisory relationship. Bovill Newgate engaged as regulatory counsel.
30,000-session synthetic journey test programme before go-live. 56–68 structured consumer qualitative testing sessions. Customer Testing Methodology documented and available for FCA review.
Vesper's B2B2C model makes VesperAI available as licensed compliance infrastructure for IFAs, wealth platforms, and financial services firms who face the advice gap but lack the technology or regulatory permission to deliver Targeted Support at scale.
VesperAI handles the Targeted Support layer — freeing your advisers to focus on the clients who need full personal advice. We hold the PS25/22 permission. You retain the client relationship.
Embed VesperAI as a white-label Targeted Support layer within your existing platform. Your brand, your customer journey, our compliance infrastructure and FCA permission.
Financial wellbeing at scale. VesperAI provides employees with regulated investment guidance as a workplace benefit — driving ISA and SIPP engagement at zero cost to the employee.
Ram brings 30 years of business building experience, including seed fundraising for multiple companies through the Welsh Government High Growth Programme and angel investor syndicates. His conviction that compliance should be a competitive moat — not a constraint — shapes every architecture decision at Vesper.
Vesper is actively recruiting for two founding roles. If you have the experience and want meaningful equity in a first-mover regulated fintech, we want to hear from you.
Raising £150,000–£400,000 on a SAFE / Convertible Note. Valuation cap £1.5M–£2.5M. SEIS eligible — 50% income tax relief. Seed round target £750k–£2M (EIS) follows FCA PASS engagement.
Request the investor deck →Whether you're an investor, a potential B2B2C partner, a compliance professional considering joining the team, or an IFA firm exploring Targeted Support — we'd like to hear from you.