UK Financial Conduct Authority Discusses Strategy for 2025 to 2030

The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority has published a speech by Emily Shepperd, FCA Chief Operating Officer, on the FCA's strategy for 2025 to 2030. In the speech, Ms. Shepperd sets out the four main themes of the FCA's strategy. Ms. Shepperd emphasises that trust in both the FCA and the financial services sector underpins these themes and will be crucial as the FCA looks to pursue growth, alongside ensuring proportionality in regulation and encouraging innovation. She also explains that the FCA has decided to set its ambitions on 2030, a five-year strategy, learning from its first 3-year strategy that it takes time to deliver and cement change.

The four main themes of the FCA's strategy are:

• Becoming a more efficient and effective regulator: The FCA wants to become more predictable, pragmatic and proportionate in the way that it operates. The FCA is looking to simplify its retail conduct rules and guidance, especially where there are areas of complexity, duplication or over-prescription. Ms. Shepperd also explains that the FCA is looking to where possible automate elements that are rote and focus colleagues' time on the judgements to be made.
• Tackling financial crime: Ms. Shepperd explains that the FCA is seeking partnerships to share data where it can, to use data analytics to find connections that help to identify and prosecute the underbelly that operates in financial services. She explains that FCA is considering new ways to reduce some KYC checks required for onboarding new customers, such as digital passports.
• Building consumer resilience: The FCA wants to ensure consumers have access to, and the confidence to use, appropriate products and services to support their financial wellbeing through their whole lives. Ms. Shepperd explains that the FCA's work on the Consumer Duty, financial exclusion and refining the line between advice and guidance all contributes to achieving this aim.
• Supporting economic growth and innovation: To help facilitate growth in the economy as a regulator the FCA needs to reduce the cost of regulation, or more specifically, to ensure there is good value from it, support innovation, and facilitate investment in the real economy, including resolving the advice guidance boundary. Examples of this include the FCA's work on Fintech, AI and sustainable finance.

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