The FCA’s annual report highlights its work in several areas, including:
- to tackle financial crime and unauthorised financial services, it suspended, removed or blocked over 1,600 websites in 2024 – also working with big tech platforms so that over 50 apps were removed from their stores. It also intervened on around 20,000 non-compliant financial promotions, took action to prevent illegal promotions by finfluencers and cancelled a record number of firm authorisations – over 1,500;
- a report against its metrics for its 2022-25 strategy, looking at its progress against each of its 13 commitments. Highlights included:
- more customers thinking firms are honest and transparent in how they deal with them;
- increasing the number of cancelled authorisations by 121% over 3 years;
- halving the FSCS levy over the period;
- improving the performance of London as a market; and
- increasing standards at the authorisation gateway;
- on operating service metrics:
- achieving or exceeding targets for 84% of the 52 standards it measures – a significant year on year improvement;
- better customer satisfaction from firms
- improved application metrics, particularly for the problem areas of EMI and PSR applications and changes in control; and
- on enforcement:
- significantly increasing the pace and focus of its work – 5 recent operations getting a public outcome in under 16 months; and
- issuing 37 Final Notices, getting 5 criminal convictions, fining over £186m, cancelling nearly 1,500 authorisations and achieving 135 outcomes using intervention tools. Its investigations included around 1500 “use it or lose it” cases and over 1,000 relating to returns.