FCA lays out three year plan to increase ‘enforcement and intervention’
The City watchdog has laid out a new three year regulatory strategy today to sharpen its efforts to protect consumers and increase its powers of “enforcement and intervention”.
The Financial Conduct Authority has set out 13 commitments over three areas to reduce and prevent serious harm to consumers, set higher standards and promote more competition in the industry.
The watchdog will also for the first time publish measures that it can be judged against in a bid to boost its enforcement activity.
Boss Nikhil Rathi said it needed to take a more active role in financial markets.
“We are being tougher on firms who want authorisation to operate in the UK, using data more systematically to ask the firms we supervise more rigorous questions and using our enforcement and intervention powers more actively, pushing the boundaries where we need to,” he said in a statement today.
The group said it would also go on a recruitment push to tackle problem firms, with 95 colleagues brought in to make processes for authorising firms more “robust and efficient”.
“Dozens” more staff will also be brought in to clampdown and remove problem businesses, Rathi said, as the watchdog looks to shut out businesses with the most potential to create harm.
The recruitment drive comes after the watchdog has been locked in a pay dispute with staff in recent months.
Financial services specialists at accountancy giant EY said the new plan retained a focus on how the FCA would transform and hold itself to account rather than new initiatives, but they predicted that businesses would welcome the new guidelines.
“Firms that have invested in getting ahead of this regulatory change will welcome this as a signal that the FCA’s regulatory priorities remain consistent,” Simon Turner, UK Financial Services Partner at EY said.
“The strategic priorities provide continuity with the last business plan, and make clear that the shift in focus to outcomes remains. The responsibility lies squarely on firms to ensure that they are acting within the spirit of the rules.”
Turner said the focus on the Consumer Duty in the plans makes the policy statement expected later this year “even more important” in terms of understanding how the FCA will approach the supervision of firms in the coming years.