Our annual work programme details what we will deliver in 2025/26 on our 4 strategic priorities.
Introduction
Annual work programme 2025/26: Quote image
In March 2025, we published our strategy[1] for the next 5 years.
Our work helps to enable a fair and thriving financial services market for the good of consumers and the economy. We want to support economic growth and improve lives.
This means we will need to deepen trust and show that we are an efficient and effective regulator, as well as proportionate and predictable.
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Our themes
Circular diagram with 'improve lives' at the centre, surrounded by 4 aims: smarter regulator, fighting crime, supporting growth, and helping consumers – with an outer ring showing 'deepen trust' and 'rebalance risks'.
This work programme sets out what we will deliver in 2025/26 on our 4 strategic priorities:
- A smarter regulator: more efficient and effective.
- Supporting growth.
- Helping consumers navigate their financial lives.
- Fighting financial crime.
We support these through our ongoing focus on technology, data and how we develop our workforce to match future needs.
We have published the outcomes and metrics[2] we will use and will include progress against the Treasury’s regulatory support for growth paper[3].
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A smarter regulator: more efficient and effective
Annual work programme 2025/26: A smarter regulator chapter image
How we will achieve this:
Streamline data collection and improve regulatory interactions
- Reduce the burden on firms by only collecting the data we need to achieve our regulatory objectives. We continue to review our requests for information and have already identified 3 regular data returns we plan to stop, which will benefit 16,000 firms. We have identified further returns we are considering switching off and plan to consult on these in summer 2025.
- Promote firms’ single point of entry sign-in with their existing details through My FCA, which launched on 31 March 2025. For the first time, firms will be able to see most of their regulatory tasks in one place, making it easier for them to meet their regulatory responsibilities.
- Extend My FCA to include our Online Invoicing System, allowing firms to pay their annual fee via My FCA. We will also introduce improvements in how firms manage the administration of users for these systems.
- Deliver ‘flexi collections’, a new capability within RegData (a system used for regulatory reporting). This will allow firms to submit ad-hoc information requests to us more easily.
Digitise and improve our authorisation process
- Continue to digitise and simplify the way we ask firms to submit applications. This will improve the experience for firms, encourage higher-quality applications and improve the quality of data we collect, so that we can determine applications faster.
Enhance our supervision model
We will continue to reform how we regulate and supervise, so that we:
- Focus market engagement on areas where harm is the greatest, focusing on a smaller number of priorities.
- Take a more flexible approach, with less intensive supervision for those demonstrably seeking to do the right thing.
- Be transparent about the risks and opportunities we see within the market, so that external stakeholders find our actions easier to understand and predict.
- Review our firm categorisation model to build relationships with a wider range of the participants that we consider having the most significant impact and influence within their markets. These are the firms we want to maintain specific contact with, so we can engage with them directly on market risk or opportunity. They may include trade associations or other influential stakeholders.
Improve how we use intelligence and data to spot and act on harm
- Improve our ability to identify and address harm quickly, by changing our processes and using digital intelligence to identify where we need to act.
- Simplify our triage processes to focus effort on higher risk cases and reduce effort on lower risk cases, including through automation.
- Expand the use of data and intelligence to identify and act on the riskiest firms and/or individuals, including through our work with partners.
- Use new technologies to better support our supervision and authorisation teams, using network analytics to identify harmful networks of firms and/or individuals and providing contextual intelligence to help our assessment.
- Where we identify higher risk cases, we will take faster action to reduce or remediate the harm, including taking enforcement action in the right cases to achieve impactful deterrence.
Optimise our operational performance
- Use deeper insights into our operational performance and the value of our expenditure to inform our investment decisions, helping us make the biggest impact with the resources we have.
- Make our regulatory delivery, operations and processes more transparent, accountable and aligned to strategic objectives.
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Supporting growth
Annual work programme 2025/26: Supporting growth chapter image
Our strategy sets out the following 5-year outcomes that our annual work programme contributes towards:
Sustained UK economic growth, through:
- Increased competitiveness of the UK financial services industry.
- A more productive and innovative financial services industry.
What we will do this year towards achieving our outcomes
New work in 2025/26
Unlock capital investment and liquidity and support growth in the wider UK economy
- Accelerate a review of capital requirements for specialised trading firms.
- Launch proposals to simplify specific conduct requirements for commercial insurance businesses.
- Lead research, including with academics, to better understand the links between financial regulation and growth.
- Continue our work on pension reforms as set out below, under the ‘Helping consumers navigate their financial lives’ section.
Accelerate digital innovation to improve productivity
- Embrace a digital first approach to leverage technology and innovation to become a smarter, more effective and more efficient regulator.
- Work with firms to support the adoption of AI use cases, including through testing in the AI Lab.
- Work with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to assess General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) barriers to AI innovation.
- Consult on changes to the £100 contactless limit, potentially allowing firms with strong fraud controls to set their own limits.
- Consider new digital service standards, such as electronic verification of death, to speed up bereavement insurance claims.
- On open banking and finance, we will:
- Use 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.
- As the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) and its functions are primarily consolidated within the FCA, we will work with the PSR and partners to deliver the National Payments Vision, which includes a new open banking payment method (variable recurring payments).
Reduce the regulatory burden
- Streamline data collection and improve regulatory interactions.
- Streamline rules, guidance materials and wider communications now that the Consumer Duty is in place, as summarised in our March update on our Requirements Review Call for Input[4].
- Ensure future consumer protection work first considers the Consumer Duty, rather than requiring new rules. See the ‘Helping consumers navigate their financial lives’ section for our work to simplify our responsible lending and advice requirements for mortgages, consulting on removing outdated interest-only mortgage guidance and working with the Government to remove overlapping standards.
Certainty and predictability
- Provide clarity on potential motor finance redress, subject to Supreme Court and other legal timetables. See the ‘Helping consumers navigate their financial lives’ and ‘Exceptional Projects’ sections for our wider work on motor finance.
- Work with the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Treasury to modernise the redress framework, following the recent Call for Input.[5]
Make it easier for financial services firms to start up and grow, delivering more innovative and productive financial services
- Support more early and high growth firms, with an increase in dedicated supervisors.
- Provide a dedicated authorisations case officer to every firm in our regulatory sandbox.
- Extend our Pre-application Support Service (PASS) to all wholesale, payments and crypto firms.
- Indicate more frequently that we are ‘minded to approve’ promising start-up firms, to help them secure funding.
- Work with the Treasury to create a framework that enables relevant firms to conduct limited regulated activities with streamlined conditions.
- See the ‘A smarter regulator: more efficient and effective’ section for our work on digitising and improving our authorisation process.
Improve our exports and inward investment
- Partner with the Government, City of London Corporation, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and others to create an effective system that promotes the UK as a place to do business. This will support both firms seeking authorisation and firms exporting services.
- Support the Government’s strategy to establish the UK as a global sustainable finance hub. We will continue to implement existing regulations, consult on the rules for ESG Ratings providers, and consult on International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and transition plan disclosures. We will also continue our international work to help develop and align global standards.
- Establish a presence in the US and in the Asia Pacific region.
Ongoing work in 2025/26
Unlock capital investment and liquidity and support growth in the wider UK economy
- Implement a new prospectus regime, with major shifts in thresholds and liability.
- Implement a new regime for companies to make public offers of securities via a regulated platform, without the need for a prospectus.
- Improve retail investors’ access to corporate bonds by making it easier for companies to issue lower denomination bonds.
- Enable a new market for private companies to improve their ability to scale (the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System or PISCES).
- Improve data and transparency in financial markets by implementing the new transparency regime for bonds and derivatives; establishing the operator of a bond consolidated tape so fixed income data is accessible; and proposals for how an equity consolidated tape could work.
- Implement more options for investors to pay for investment research.
- Implement a new commodities derivatives regime to replace aspects of the inherited EU regime.
- Continue to simplify capital markets rules under the Wholesale Markets Review and Smarter Regulatory Framework. For example, proposing improvements in securitisation markets to support lending.
- Enable savers to invest more effectively through improving access to help, advice and guidance so they can make informed decisions. See the ‘Helping consumers navigate their financial lives’ and ‘Exceptional Projects’ sections for more on our Advice Guidance Boundary Review work.
- Introduce pro-competitiveness reforms to remuneration rules for banks, building societies and PRA-designated investment firms.
- Amend investment product disclosure rules so firms can innovate and consumers can invest with confidence.
- Improve the quality of credit information with changes to industry governance.
Accelerate digital innovation to enhance productivity
- Progress the digital securities sandbox and develop a roadmap for digital assets, starting with the asset management industry.
- Support innovative firms through our innovation services and sandboxes, including the AI Lab. These firms can test and experiment in a safe environment and develop new sustainable solutions, products and services that benefit consumers and businesses.
- Support innovation in AI by using our existing regulatory frameworks, avoiding additional costs involved in creating specific new ones.
- Play our part in the UK preparing to adopt securities settlement in one day and moving to an electronic form of securities.
- See the ‘Helping consumers navigate their financial lives’ and ‘Exceptional Projects’ sections on our work on the Pensions Dashboards.
Reduce the regulatory burden
- Continue to engage with industry to improve our transaction reporting regime by removing unnecessary burdens for firms while maintaining the high regulatory standards our markets are renowned for.
- Continue to streamline regulation by making the Senior Managers & Certification Regime (SM&CR) more efficient and outcomes-focused, including reducing administrative burdens.
- Streamline 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.
Crypto regime
We are developing a safe and stable UK crypto regulatory regime to ensure markets operate with integrity and we foster innovation and competition. We aim to consult during 2025 on all the crypto activities due to be regulated as set out by the Treasury. We will then work towards issuing policy statements in 2026 and subsequently opening the gateway for authorisation. We continue to supervise crypto firms registered under the Money Laundering Regulations, helping them to prepare for the new regime and dealing with poor behaviour.
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Helping consumers navigate their financial lives
Annual work programme 2025/26: Helping consumers navigate their financial lives chapter image
Our strategy sets out the following 5-year outcomes that our annual work programme contributes towards:
More consumers are better able to:
- Withstand a change in circumstances.
- Save and invest more for later life.
- Have more consistently positive experiences when engaging with financial services.
What we will do this year towards achieving our outcomes
New work in 2025/26
Deferred Payment Credit (DPC)/ Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)
- Work with Government to bring DPC into our regulatory regime, in particular by developing a rules framework to replace the disapplied Consumer Credit Act provisions on information disclosure. This will ensure that consumers can use BNPL products appropriately to help them navigate financial shocks and flexibly manage their spending and budgets. Our new regulation will aim for good outcomes for borrowers and alignment with rules already in place for other credit providers.
Innovation
- Encourage firms to use innovative solutions that improve consumer resilience. This includes supporting firms that are developing solutions through our innovation services, engaging with industry and broader stakeholders and considering further collaboration, partnership and research. We will also take forward policy work in areas that will support innovation and consumer resilience.
Ongoing work in 2025/26
Motor finance
We are currently reviewing the past use of motor finance commission arrangements. We are seeking to understand if firms failed to comply with requirements relating to commission arrangements and if consumers lost out as a result.
We have confirmed that if, taking into account the Supreme Court's decision, we conclude motor finance customers have lost out from widespread failings by firms, then it is likely we will consult on an industry-wide redress scheme.
We will confirm within 6 weeks of the Supreme Court’s decision if we are proposing a redress scheme and, if so, how we will take it forward.
Depending on the Supreme Court’s decision, we may also consult separately on changes to our rules.
In line with our strategy objectives, we will continue to consider how to make sure affected consumers are appropriately compensated and the motor finance market continues to work well, with effective competition, for the millions of consumers who rely on it every year.
Consumer Duty
- Continue to embed and use the Consumer Duty for our consumer protection work. The Duty was a major intervention, setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services.
- To drive this, we will continue sharing good and poor practice examples so firms can see how the Duty is driving change and to help them deliver good outcomes for consumers. This will include areas like outcomes monitoring, fair value and consumer understanding, as well as how our requirements apply through the distribution chain.
- Where necessary, we will use our supervisory and enforcement powers to ensure customers are appropriately protected.
Advice Guidance Boundary Review (AGBR)
- Reform previous rules on advice and guidance, so that consumers have access to the help, guidance and advice that they need to make informed decisions, at a cost they can afford.
- Accelerate this work by first proposing rules for a new form of regulated support – targeted support – across pensions and retail investments.
Pensions
- Continue to work to make pensions dashboards a reality. We will open our authorisation gateway for firms wanting to operate a private sector dashboard only when the Government and the Pensions Dashboard Programme have produced the information necessary for a firm to design and build a pensions dashboard service.
- Introduce a regulatory framework on the long-term value of pension products, working with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Pensions Regulator (TPR). While focused on consumer outcomes, the Value for Money framework[6] should also support consolidation and scale and give transparency about asset allocation.
- Support the delivery of measures in the expected Pensions Bill.
Government financial inclusion strategy
- Support the Government’s development of a national financial inclusion strategy by participating in the Financial Inclusion Committee.
- Continue to work with others to enable consumers to build their financial resilience by, for example, working with external stakeholders to promote the wider roll-out of workplace savings.
Supporting customers in vulnerable circumstances
- Support the industry to deliver improvements for consumers in vulnerable circumstances, drawing on the Consumer Duty, good practice and areas of improvement we identified in our review[7].
Consumer engagement
- Build on our engagement and work with others to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of different consumer experiences. This will help shape many of our strategic activities and help more consumers engage with our work to deliver good consumer outcomes.
Pure protection products and premium finance for motor and home insurance
- Conduct 2 market studies to see whether people who buy protection products such as term assurance or critical illness cover, and those using premium finance to pay for motor and home insurance, are getting fair value. These market studies will assess if competition is working effectively in these markets.
- Participate in the Government’s motor insurance task force, looking at any actions to help stabilise or reduce motor insurance premiums.
Mortgage Rule Review
We have started reviewing our responsible lending and advice rules for mortgages to make them simpler, supporting home ownership.
In May we will consult on proposals to make remortgaging, term reductions and discussing mortgage options without needing to take regulated advice, better for consumers. We will also propose retiring guidance where the Consumer Duty now sets higher standards of consumer protection, reducing the regulatory burden on firms.
In June we 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.
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Fighting financial crime
Annual work programme 2025/26: Fighting financial crime chapter image
Our strategy sets out the following 5-year outcomes that our annual work programme contributes towards:
- Slower growth in investment and Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud.
- Protect market integrity.
- Tackle money laundering through the financial system.
What we will do this year towards achieving our outcomes
New work in 2025/26
Identify financial crime
- Build a new data-led detection capability to bring together multiple data sets. This will enable us to increase our identification of financial crime in regulated firms and take timely action to tackle it.
Tackle organised crime
- We will make it harder for serious organised crime to abuse regulated financial services to launder their money and commit crime. We will do this through increased collaboration with partners to share and analyse data, working together to remove the gaps where criminals hide. We will both prevent them getting access to financial firms and disrupt and disable their activities when we detect them.
Ongoing work for 2025/26
Invest in our systems
- Continue to invest to allow us to use intelligence and data more effectively in our financial crime work, so we can target higher-risk firms and activities.
Engage with partners
- Actively engage with government, regulators, law enforcement and industry both domestically and internationally to share data, tackle criminal networks and reduce financial crime.
- Lead a cross-industry project to better understand the flow of illegitimate funds across different types of APP fraud to better prevent them.
- Drive improvements in the legal and accountancy sectors through the Office for Professional Body Anti-Money laundering Supervision (OPBAS) to ensure the Professional Body Supervisors are effective in the core areas of supervision, risk-based approach, enforcement and intelligence and information-sharing.
Proactive, targeted supervision
- Focus on proactive assessments of anti-money laundering systems and controls for those firms we deem higher risk. As part of our response, we will collaborate with key stakeholders to establish whether a robust and shared money laundering metric can be developed.
- Continuing to engage with firms to strengthen sanctions systems and controls.
Market abuse
- Protect market integrity through continued assertive action against market abuse. Continue to improve our detection and investigation capabilities and deliver deterrence through a range of supervisory, civil and criminal sanctions.
Use innovation, technology and our powers
- Use data and technology to identify websites and social media that promote unauthorised financial services, raising public awareness of these through our Warning List,[8] and anti-fraud campaigns.
- Use our powers to disrupt, pursue and sanction those committing and enabling financial crime.
- Continue to support the development of new innovation and technology in the fight against financial crime, including through RegTech firms.
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Our budget
Budget chapter icon
Our annual budget is driven by:
- The cost of our core operating activities (our ongoing regulatory activities (ORA)), which is mainly our workforce.
- The exceptional projects we undertake, and
- Capital expenditure to develop our technology and information systems and implement new regulatory and operational requirements.
Annual Funding Requirement
In 2025/2026, while our ORA budget is going up by 2.5%, our annual funding requirement (AFR) is £783.5m, leading to an overall increase of 3.8%. The difference is due to additional recoveries on exceptional projects which we detail below.
The actual fees we collect will reflect the AFR net of rebates from financial penalties we collect (forecast at £70.3m).
We will provide additional detail on how we will distribute the AFR across fee-payers in our annual fees rates consultation paper[9], which we will publish alongside our work programme.
The ORA budget
The ORA budget comprises a flat, in real terms, base ORA budget increasing by 2.4% (£17.5m). This includes the increase to employers National Insurance Contributions (£7.5m). We also include new charges for changes to our core operating activities. For 2025/26, this includes new charges for work on Pensions Dashboards and Access to Cash. Adding these gives a rebased ORA budget of £747.3m, an overall 2.5% increase on last year.
Exceptional projects
We raise fees for exceptional projects to extend our regulatory remit and implement government initiatives and legislation. This helps us promote innovation and competition through our regulatory work. It also enables us to reduce harm to consumers and help them make more informed choices.
Advice Guidance Boundary Review
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest £3.7m icon
We will invest £3.7m in relation to our joint work with the Government to support firms’ innovation in offering targeted support to customers in their investment and pensions decisions.
Open Banking/Open Finance
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest 1.2m and £2m icon
We will invest £1.2m in our work to develop the long-term regulatory framework for Open Banking and establishing a sustainable and competitive footing so that the ecosystem can grow beyond the current functionalities and bring greater choice to users while boosting innovation and growth.
We will also invest a further £2m to develop Open Finance, empowering consumers with greater control over their financial data, enabling personalised services and improving financial inclusion. We want Open Finance to encourage new entrants and greater innovation.
Smarter Regulatory Framework
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest £9m icon
We will invest £9m in our continuing Smarter Regulatory Framework work on the repeal of assimilated EU law and its replacement, where appropriate, with FCA rules tailored to UK markets.
InvestSmart Campaigns
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest £2.3m icon
We will invest £2.3m to help educate consumers so they can avoid harm and make better-informed investment decisions balancing risk and reward.
Cryptoasset Stablecoins and Wider Regime
Annual work programme 2025/26:: Invest £7.8m icon
We will invest £7.8m in developing and implementing a proportionate and safe regulatory regime for crypto activities in the UK, promoting a competitive and innovative sector.
Funeral Plans
Annual work programme 2025/26: Recover icon
We will continue the recovery of Funeral Plans implementation costs at £0.7m a year as stated in our 2023/24 Fee Rates Consultation Paper[10].
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Ratings
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest £3m icon
We will invest £3m in the new regulation of ESG ratings and plan to consult on rules for the future regulatory regime. We are engaging closely with the Government to finalise the legislation.
Motor Finance
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest £6.9m icon
We will invest £6.9m in our review of motor finance discretionary commission complaints. Our review seeks to understand if consumers have lost out because of widespread misconduct and, if so, the best way to make sure appropriate compensation is paid in an orderly, consistent and efficient way.
Pensions Dashboards
Annual work programme 2025/26: Invest 0.7m icon
In addition to the £0.4m of new charges for ongoing costs into our ORA budget, we will invest £0.7m to establish an authorisations gateway for private sector pensions dashboards operators. Pensions dashboards will find and display information about pensions to consumers. The Money and Pensions Service is developing the technical elements to make this happen and FCA regulated pension providers are required to connect to this by 31 October 2026.
Cryptoasset Financial Promotions
Annual work programme 2025/26: Return icon
We will return fees of £1m for Cryptoasset financial promotions work which we did not use.
Capital expenditure
Our capital expenditure budget reflects the ongoing delivery of IT systems and infrastructure. Capital expenditure is largely funded through the ORA depreciation charge.
| £m | 2025/26 | 2024/25 |
|---|---|---|
| IT systems development and infrastructure | 32.1 | 38.6 |
| Property plant and equipment | 1.3 | 4.6 |
| Total budget | 33.4 | 43.2 |