FCA publishes Business Plan 2024/2025

The FCA’s 2024/25 Business Plan highlights the work carried out to date, and what it plans to do in the coming year, the final year of its 3 year strategy.

The strategy continues a focus on delivery of the FCA’s 13 public commitments, which are:

• reducing and preventing financial crime;
• putting consumers’ needs first;
• strengthening the UK’s position in global wholesale markets;
• preparing financial services for the future;
• dealing with problem firms;
• taking assertive action against market abuse;
• reducing harm from firm failure;
• ESG priorities;
• shaping digital markets to achieve good outcomes;
• improving the redress framework;
• enabling consumers to help themselves;
• minimising the impact of operational disruptions; and
• improving oversight of Appointed Representatives.

Its work over the next year will focus on the first 3 commitments, and will include significant work to build on the Consumer Duty, to improve outcomes for customers in financial difficulties and to ensure access to cash.

Over the next year, the FCA will focus on:

• protecting consumers: primarily through:
  • testing how well firms have embedded the Consumer Duty;
  • continuing work on the Advice Guidance Boundary Review;
  • working on ensuring pension products deliver value for money and getting consumers to engage better with their pensions; and
  • developing the use of AI to prevent frauds and scams;
• ensuring market integrity: primarily through capital market reforms, and investment in data and technology for market oversight;
• promoting effective competition: including looking at how more effective competition can help to get better Consumer Duty outcomes;
• embedding its secondary international competitiveness and growth objective;
• investing in more staff with the right skills; and
• its own operational effectiveness and resilience.

Against this, it sees the particular challenges of the coming year as including:

• higher interest rates and persistent inflation;
• global financial risks; and
• geopolitical risks.

Alongside its plan, the FCA has published updated pages on its website looking at its approach to supervision and to competition, and a new page on its approach to consumers.