The FCA has published a set of good and poor practices to help applicants for authorisation and registration. It focuses on 3 themes:
- having staff with appropriate skills, experience and capacity
- it is good where firms provide clear ownership charts with suitability assessments, and plans to recruit or fill identified gaps, and where they clearly explain the rationale for staff incentives;
- the FCA does not like to see firms overly relying on their compliance consultant and being unable to show they understand their regulatory obligations without that support. It also finds that firms are often not clearly showing how individuals with multiple responsibilities will split their time and, for applicants starting up in the UK from overseas, these often fail to show a commitment to the UK and the right of staff to work in the UK;
- having robust policies that document process and procedures
- the best applications check that their business plans include all key information and make clear how decisions are made and what their reporting lines are. The FCA also likes to see analysis of why each permission applied for is needed and how firms weave in the Consumer Duty throughout all their documentation;
- on the unsatisfactory end of the scale, the FCA sees policies that are not tailored to the business and do not consider all proper scenarios. It does not like to see policies that merely recite its rules without saying how the firm will comply with them, or policies that don’t alight with each other;
- having financial resources that are appropriate for the nature and scale of the business
- firms should use the templates the FCA has provided and give evidence of their funding arrangements and to support the information they include in their application;
- the FCA often has to delay assessments where firms have not provided their past accounts or submit inaccurate or unverified information.