Consumer Duty After Authorisation: What the FCA’s Ongoing Supervision Actually Looks Like
Getting authorised does not mean the FCA stops watching. For most firms, it means the FCA starts watching differently. Under AML registration, the FCA’s supervisory relationship with a firm was primarily focused on financial crime controls. With authorisation, that remit expands significantly — and Consumer Duty sits at the centre of the FCA’s ongoing supervisory […]
September Is On Its Way: Your Pre-Autumn Compliance Checklist
The FCA’s crypto authorisation window opens soon. If your firm is planning to submit an application — or is already operating in a way that requires authorisation – the time to have addressed the gaps in your compliance framework was before this week. But for firms that still have outstanding items, the next seven days […]
One Promotion, Three Problems: When Financial Promotions, Consumer Duty and GDPR Collide
This series has covered financial promotions compliance, Consumer Duty obligations, and GDPR requirements across separate pieces – because each regime is substantial enough to warrant its own treatment. But the regimes do not operate in isolation. In practice, a single piece of marketing activity can simultaneously engage all three, and a failure in one dimension […]
Section 21 Approvals for Crypto Promotions: What’s Changed and What It Means for Your Firm
When the FCA’s financial promotions regime for cryptoassets came into force in October 2023, firms that were not themselves authorised or registered needed a route to communicate financial promotions legally. The section 21 approval route — under which an FCA-authorised person approves a promotion on behalf of an unauthorised firm — provided that route. Many […]
GDPR and Direct Marketing: What a Defensible Consent Record Actually Looks Like
An earlier piece in this series covered the lawful basis framework for post-onboarding marketing – the distinction between consent and legitimate interests, what the soft opt-in permits, and why the two bases are not interchangeable. That piece established the foundation. This piece goes further. The question firms most often get wrong is not which lawful […]
Consumer Duty and Vulnerable Customers: Where Firms Are Still Falling Short
Consumer Duty places a specific and demanding obligation on firms to identify customers in vulnerable circumstances and to ensure that those customers receive outcomes that are at least as good as those received by other customers. It is not enough to treat all customers the same and call that fair. The FCA’s position is explicit: […]
Affiliate Marketing and Crypto Promotions: Where Firms Are Exposed Without Knowing It
The principle has been established clearly in earlier pieces in this series: firms are responsible for every financial promotion that reaches UK consumers on their behalf, whether they created it or not. If an affiliate publishes a non-compliant promotion for your product, the exposure is yours. The FCA has said so explicitly, and its enforcement […]
GDPR and Crypto Onboarding: Where Firms Are Exposed Without Realising It
Crypto firms spend significant time and resource building onboarding processes that satisfy the FCA. KYC checks, AML screening, appropriateness assessments, risk warnings, cooling-off periods — the regulatory requirements are well understood, and most firms have invested in meeting them. What far fewer firms have done is ask a separate but equally important question: is the […]
Consumer Duty in 2026: Can You Prove It’s Working?
Consumer Duty came into force in July 2023. Most firms spent the months before that deadline building implementation plans, updating policies, revising communications, and appointing a Consumer Duty Champion. That work was necessary. But it was only the beginning. The FCA’s supervisory focus has shifted. It is no longer asking whether firms implemented Consumer […]
The 5 Things the FCA Found Wrong With Crypto Promotions
When the FCA set out to assess how firms were responding to the crypto financial promotions regime, it wasn’t looking for edge cases or obscure technical failures. What it found were the same problems, at firm after firm, across the same five areas. None of them are surprising. Most of them stem not […]