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- Robert Bell
The FCA in 2024
I can’t quite believe it but 2024 is already upon us. Last year was a year of significant regulatory change, with the headline being the Consumer Duty, so what can we expect from 2024?
The FCA will continue its work on the cost-of-living crisis, monitoring the impact the crisis is having on consumers, specifically after firm intervention to provide support where needed by customers. As such they will continue to monitor the forbearance that firms are providing customers.
Work also continues on operational resilience, certainly the events of 2023 have done nothing to lessen the importance of firms being resilient both operationally and from an information security standpoint. The FCA will be continuing to assess firms’ operational resilience ahead of the 2025 deadline in order for firms to demonstrate that they can remain within specified operational impact tolerances.
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One of the FCA’s primary areas of focus is the reduction and prevention of financial crime through reducing both scams and the use of firms to launder money. They have been increasing their proactive assessments of firms’ AML controls and are working on improving their own data gathering and analysis to aid this. Cryptoasset firms will be receiving particular attention this year representing their increasing importance for the FCA.
They will also begin to focus on their new duty to encourage economic growth. In December 2023 they proposed new rules designed to encourage companies to list in the UK and will take these proposals forward later this year.
The Consumer Duty
The consumer duty story is far from over, of course there are still the closed product reviews to complete you can download our closed product review template here and legacy actions following the implementation of the duty. Once complete, firms will be able to move onto day two compliance with the duty truly embedded in the firm’s operating model, well-functioning outcomes monitoring framework and the first annual board reports.
To achieve this firms will need to review their success at implementing the duty, the first iteration is rarely the best it can be and, the FCA is finding, is often not up to standard. Helpfully, the FCA published a review of certain organisations implementation of the regime in December 2023 (Retail banking Consumer Duty multi-firm work | FCA) we recommend you read this fully as it gives valuable direction and guidance as to where there may be weaknesses.
A busy year lies ahead!
