On 8 April 2025, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its annual work programme 2025/26.

The work programme sets out what the FCA intends to deliver in 2025/26 and focuses on four strategic priorities:

  • A smarter regulator: more efficient and effective.
  • Supporting growth.
  • Helping consumers navigate their financial lives.
  • Fighting financial crime.

Smarter regulator

When discussing its priorities to become a smarter regulator the FCA covers three topics:

  • Streamlining data collection and improving regulatory interactions. This includes:
  • Continuing to review requests for information with the FCA having already identified 3 regular data returns it plans to stop, which, it states, will benefit 16,000 firms. The FCA has also identified further returns it is considering switching off and plans to consult on these in summer 2025.
  • Extending My FCA to include the regulator’s Online Invoicing System, which will allow firms to pay their annual fee via My FCA. It will also introduce improvements in how firms manage the administration of users for these systems.
  • Delivering ‘flexi collections’, a new capability within RegData (a system used for regulatory reporting) which will allow firms to submit ad-hoc information requests to the FCA more easily.
  • Digitising and improve the authorisation process. The FCA will continue to digitise and simplify the way it asks firms to submit applications.
  • Enhancing the supervision model. This includes reviewing the firm categorisation model to build relationships with a wider range of participants that the regulator considers having the most significant impact and influence within their markets.

Supporting growth

In relation to supporting growth the FCA sets out four headings:

  • Unlock capital investment and liquidity and support growth in the wider UK economy.

Ongoing work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Implementing a new prospectus regime, with major shifts in thresholds and liability.
  • Enabling a new market for private companies to improve their ability to scale (the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System or PISCES).
  • Implementing more options for investors to pay for investment research.
  • Implementing a new commodities derivatives regime to replace aspects of the inherited EU regime.
  • Introducing pro-competitiveness reforms to remuneration rules for banks, building societies and PRA-designated investment firms.
  • Amending investment product disclosure rules so firms can innovate, and consumers can invest with confidence.

New work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Accelerating a review of capital requirements for specialised trading firms.
  • Launching proposals to simplify specific conduct requirements for commercial insurance businesses.
  • Continuing work on pension reforms.
  • Accelerate digital innovation to enhance productivity.

Ongoing work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Progressing the digital securities sandbox and developing a roadmap for digital assets, starting with the asset management industry.
  • Playing a role in the UK preparing to adopt securities settlement in one day and moving to an electronic form of securities.

New work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Consulting on changes to the £100 contactless limit, potentially allowing firms with strong fraud controls to set their own limits.
  • Considering new digital service standards, such as electronic verification of death, to speed up bereavement insurance claims.         
  • Using the powers expected under the Data (Use and Access) Bill to develop the regulatory framework for open finance, prioritising Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) lending.
  • Reduce the regulatory burden.

Ongoing work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Continuing to engage with industry to improve the transaction reporting regime by removing unnecessary burdens for firms while maintaining the high regulatory standards UK markets are renowned for.
  • Continuing to streamline regulation by making the Senior Managers & Certification Regime more efficient and outcomes-focused, including reducing administrative burdens.
  • Streamlining the regulatory requirements on the asset management sector by simplifying the retail fund regime, rightsizing the regime for wholesale business and enabling better use of technology, including tokenisation of funds.

New work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Streamlining rules, guidance materials and wider communications now that the Consumer Duty is in place, as summarised in the FCA’s March update on its Requirements Review Call for Input.
  • Ensuring future consumer protection work first considers the Consumer Duty, rather than requiring new rules.
  • Extending the Pre-application Support Service (PASS) to all wholesale, payments and crypto firms.
  • Providing clarity on potential motor finance redress, subject to Supreme Court and other legal timetables.
  • Crypto regime.

Ongoing work in 2025/26 includes:

  • Developing a safe and stable UK crypto regulatory regime. The FCA plans to consult during 2025 on all the crypto activities due to be regulated as set out by HM Treasury. It will then work towards issuing policy statements in 2026 and subsequently opening the gateway for authorisation.

Helping consumers navigate their financial lives

In terms of ongoing work the FCA reports that in the motor finance space it will confirm within 6 weeks of the Supreme Court’s decision if it is proposing a redress scheme and, if so, how it will take it forward. Depending on the Supreme Court’s decision, the FCA may also consult separately on changes to its rules.

On the mortgage market review, the FCA reports that in May it will consult on proposals to make remortgaging, term reductions and discussing mortgage options without needing to take regulated advice, better for consumers. It will also propose retiring guidance where the Consumer Duty now sets higher standards of consumer protection, reducing the regulatory burden on firms. In June, the FCA will launch a public discussion on the future of the mortgage market. This will look at what it needs to deliver for different consumers at different stages in their lives and the wider UK economy, as well as how regulation can help deliver it.

New work in 2025/26 will include:

  • Working with the Government to bring Deferred Payment Credit into the regulatory regime, in particular by developing a rules framework to replace the disapplied Consumer Credit Act provisions on information disclosure.
  • Encouraging firms to use innovative solutions that improve consumer resilience.

Fighting financial crime

New work includes building a new data-led detection capability to bring together multiple data sets. This will enable the FCA to increase its identification of financial crime in regulated firms and take timely action to tackle it.