The FCA has pledged to boost its work in four key areas over the next 12 months as it enters the second year of its three-year strategy, and expects to spend £12.7m ($16m) on repealing and replacing EU law.

The commitments are made in the regulator’s Business plan 2023/24, and the four key commitments are;

• preparing financial services for the future;
• putting consumer’s needs first;
• strengthening the UK’s position in global wholesale markets;
• reducing and preventing financial crime.

It expects to invest £12.7m ($16m) to implement measures that will help financial services prepare for the future, and a further £5.3m ($6.6m) to properly embed the new consumer duty. Staff headcount is expected to increase again after rising to nearly 4,500 in 2023, up from 3,800 at the beginning of 2022.

FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi said: “We set out a bold vision last year of what we wanted the FCA to be, and we are well underway to achieving our objectives.” The plan recognises the regulator’s “new secondary objective to facilitate the international competitiveness of the UK economy and its growth in the medium to long term”.

Future Regulatory Framework

Preparing financial services for the future will involve implementing the outcomes of the Future Regulatory Framework review, and is described as “a very significant programme of work, with demanding timetable both for us and market participants over the coming year”.

On consumer protection, the plan recognises that “The Consumer Duty is a significant shift in our expectations of firms” and promises to “ensure [it] is embedded effectively within firms and central to their technology”. It plans to allocate additional staff dedicated to working with firms to support consumers.

Strengthening the UK’s position in global wholesale markets involves a number of actions. These are;

• upgrading systems and continuing to automate analytic tools so that harms can be detected faster;
• scaling up systems and reducing costs;
• improving infrastructure security;
• improving data collection methods to reduce the burden on firms.

Financial crime remains a major challenge, and the plan commits to better use of data in order to tackle growing issues such as Authorised Push Payment and investment fraud. The use of machine learning methods to take down scam websites will increase.