4 Key Themes in FCAs 2025/26 Work Plan

We’ve identified four key themes in the FCA's Annual Work Programme for 2025/26:

1. Supporting Growth

It is hardly a surprise that FCA leads with how it intends to support the current government’s growth agenda. Here we see two main areas where the FCA thinks it can help:

• FCA has restated its intention to foster innovation and competitiveness in financial services but notes it still needs to balance that with ensuring markets work effectively for consumers and businesses.

• A big potential win for regulated firms is the promise to simplify regulatory processes, such as data collection and administrative tasks.

2. Smarter Regulator

The current climate makes market integrity an imperative for FCA and supervisory efforts will target firms with significant market impact, aiming to ensure transparency and effective risk management.

FCA will enhance its use of data and intelligence to focus on tackling financial crime, naturally this brings fraud further up the list of priorities when fighting financial crime. This will include significant collaboration with other authorities in sharing information and reduce blind spots across the regulated sector to prevent criminals taking advantage.

3. Helping Consumers

We’ll see a continued focus on access to financial advice and reforms of the redress regime.

FCA intends to make investments into its InvestSmart Campaigns in the hope that will lead to better informed decision making by investors

There will be a simplification of the mortgage responsible lending and advice rules with consultations coming out later this year.

4. Fighting Crime

We all know FCA has been transitioning to becoming more data led as a regulator. It says in the financial crime space it now intends to use enhanced data and intelligence to identify firms and networks at higher risk of financial crime, including fraud. Fraud has been very slowly creeping up the FCA agenda and looks set to become a key area of focus this year.

Leaman Crellin has identified the new initiatives FCA has planned for 2025/26 which may also apply to your firm, you can read that article here.