Aria is built to deliver 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. The FCA's CP26/10 consultation, open until 22 May 2026, proposes a further Simplified Advice regime for individual product recommendations. Aria's architecture is designed to be compliance-ready for both. For the first time, authorised firms can deliver personalised investment suggestions without conducting individualised suitability assessments. Aria 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 direct authorisation application is in preparation — we are positioning the firm to be among the early operators under this permission.
Aria 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 designed to be compliance-ready for CP26/10 Simplified Advice — it 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.
Back-tested blended returns for each of the five ready-made baskets over the 12 months to March 2026, weighted by the fixed ISP-APP-F v2.1 allocations. Returns rise across the risk ladder as equity and satellite exposure increases. Illustrative only — not a forecast.
Data: Yahoo Finance · Period: 21 March 2025 – 20 March 2026 · Risk-free rate: 4.5% p.a. · Blended returns weighted by ISP-APP-F v2.1 §5.3 allocations. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Capital at risk.
Every Vesper consumer receives a ready-made suggestion drawn from one of five pre-built ETF baskets. The deterministic rules engine assigns the segment; the basket composition is fixed in advance, reviewed quarterly, and signed off under SYSC 22. All five segments use the same eight-ETF universe — what differs is the weight allocation across asset classes and factors.
Capital preservation focus. Heavy defensive allocation across nominal gilts, inflation-linked gilts, and low-volatility equity. Minimal satellite exposure — zero allocation to mining/resources. For consumers prioritising protection of capital and purchasing power over a short horizon.
Modest growth with a strong defensive core. Begins to introduce satellite tilts (BRWM, EIMI) at low weights for diversification benefit. Sized for consumers who can tolerate moderate drawdown in exchange for meaningful long-run participation in equity returns.
Balanced growth and income. Approximately equal equity and defensive allocation. Full eight-ETF exposure across all factor dimensions — first segment where every position carries non-trivial weight. The "central" portfolio of the five-segment model.
Growth-oriented. Equity dominates the allocation, with satellite exposure (EIMI, BRWM) materially expanded. Defensive allocation is retained for drawdown management — particularly the inflation-linked sleeve, which is held at minimum 5% across all higher-risk segments to preserve real-return regime coverage.
Maximum long-term compounding. High equity concentration with satellite positions (BRWM, EIMI) at full weight. Defensive allocation reduced to the minimum required for inflation-regime coverage (INXG) and modest low-volatility ballast (WMVG). Only assigned where the consumer demonstrates strong financial resilience and emotional tolerance for severe drawdown.
Allocations from ISP-APP-F v2.1 §5.3, reviewed quarterly under SYSC 22 sign-off. heteroPCA validation confirms each ETF loads onto a distinct systematic factor — in particular that INXG and IGLT behave as separate factors (inflation protection vs. rates duration) and that WMVG is distinct from VWRL (low-volatility equity vs. global equity beta). Worst-case drawdowns shown are model-derived; past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Capital is at risk. Full methodology in ISP-001 v1.1 and the heteroPCA Theory Paper v2.1.
Aria'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. SMF16 (Compliance Oversight) appointment under SM&CR before authorisation.
Annual Consumer Duty audit by qualified third-party reviewer. Ongoing FCA supervisory relationship. Vesper is in active discussions with a specialist regulatory counsel to act as an independent oversight agent — appointment anticipated ahead of FCA authorisation submission.
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 Aria 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 — and compliance-ready for CP26/10 Simplified Advice as it comes into force.
Aria handles the Targeted Support layer — freeing your advisers to focus on the clients who need full personal advice. You retain the client relationship.
Embed Aria 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. Aria 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.
Whether you're an investor, a potential B2B2C partner, a compliance professional considering joining the team, or an IFA firm exploring Targeted Support or CP26/10 Simplified Advice — we'd like to hear from you.
Answer 7 questions. Get your segment. See your fantasy portfolio. Find out how you would have done vs a Cash ISA.
Educational only · Not regulated financial advice · Capital at risk · Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results · Vesper Financial Technology Ltd — FCA authorisation in preparation
Saves a dated record of your suggested ETF basket with the mandatory disclosures.
Drag to reorder — best performer at the top. Your actual portfolio is shown after.
Period: 21 March 2025 – 20 March 2026
Fantasy Balanced Growth Portfolio · 12 months to March 2026
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⚠ Educational illustration only. This is not regulated financial advice or a personal recommendation. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. All investing involves risk and you may get back less than you invest. ETF returns shown are historical (21 March 2025 – 20 March 2026) and include simulated portfolio weightings. Capital at risk. Cash ISA rate shown is the best easy-access rate available March 2026 (approx. 4.8%). UK pension default return source: Corporate Adviser Master Trust & GPP Defaults Report 2025. Vesper Financial Technology Ltd is not yet FCA-authorised. FCA PS25/22 Targeted Support application in progress. This tool is provided for informational purposes under the financial guidance boundary.
Five topics. Real questions. Instant explanations. Find out how much you actually know about investing — no jargon, no judgement.
Aria explains every investment decision in plain English — because an informed investor is a better investor.
Explore 12-month price performance, volatility signals and portfolio impact for the five dominant stocks inside your VWRL holding. This is Vesper+ — the automated portfolio management layer launching at Series A.
These signals are illustrative of the automated monitoring layer in Vesper+. In the live product, trigger events generate SMF16 compliance alerts and, where pre-authorised, rebalancing instructions to Seccl.
Two challenges. All historical data — no crystal balls required. Learn what drives ETF returns and why some outperform their rivals.
Aria is not yet authorised to accept investments. The ETFs in your fantasy portfolio are available on these FCA-regulated platforms. We receive no referral fee.