The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has today published its annual Business Plan. The Business Plan outlines seven priority themes which will guide how the FCA will use its flexible resources and provide additional focus for the core activities of the organisation. The seven themes are: pensions, financial crime and anti-money laundering, wholesale financial markets, advice, innovation and technology, firms’ culture and governance, and the treatment of existing customers.
Tracey McDermott, acting Chief Executive of the FCA said: “It is our job to make markets work well. Ensuring effective and proportionate regulation which tackles the problems of the past without inhibiting developments of the future is at the heart of what we do. Over the next year we will continue to embed this sustainable approach to regulation in everything we do. The majority of our resources remain devoted to our core business and today we have set out the outcomes we want our work to achieve. Transparency is important to us, and this plan will give all stakeholders an understanding of our focus for the year ahead.”
The Business Plan sets out a number of pieces of work across the breadth of our responsibilities that will help the FCA achieve its desired outcomes. As well as ensuring our rules are sustainable, these include launching a market study looking at retirement outcomes, implementing the recommendations of the Financial Advice Market Review, developing a policy to extend the Senior Managers and Certification Regime to all FSMA firms, supervising the major UK FICC benchmarks and launching the “Regulatory Sandbox” to give firms a safe space to test innovative products and services.
Alongside its business plan the FCA has also published its fees consultation paper for 2016/17. The FCA’s annual funding requirement for the year will be £519.3 million, an increase of 7.8% on the previous year. The increase is due to the inclusion of Consumer Credit in operating costs for the first time. Excluding Consumer Credit, the FCA budget has reduced by £7.6 million.
