At the Consumer Duty Alliance Conference Manchester, Nick Hulme, FCA’s Head of Department for Advisers, Wealth & Pensions Supervision, highlighted that the regulator sees their 2025 advice market survey as serving a dual purpose: supporting the regulator’s supervision and policy work, while also enabling firms themselves to benchmark their business models, advice processes and outcomes against peers of a similar size and profile.
The FCA’s consultation on simplifying advice rules is a structural reset for the UK advice market. It is not a dilution of standards. It is a move toward clearer, more proportionate regulation, with Consumer Duty as the anchor.
The recent NVIDIA keynote set out a clear direction for AI. The key message is simple: the industry is moving from building models to running them continuously in real-world use.
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) frameworks are becoming central to how UK financial advice firms’ networks and support services demonstrate accountability. For FCA directly authorised firms, restricted advice firms and principal firms overseeing appointed representatives (ARs), regulatory expectations increasingly require structured governance supported by clear oversight and independent internal audit.
The recent HMT consultation on reform of the Appointed Representative (AR) regime signals that the structure remains under close scrutiny. While the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has already strengthened its supervisory framework through PS22/11, HMT is clearly testing whether further structural reform is required to address harm within principal–AR models.
When it comes to regulations, the saying ‘no road stays the same’ springs to mind. This year’s Model Office MO® Regulatory Horizon scan provides a review of the main FCA regulatory directives that will influence retail intermediary firms in the year ahead.
We currently have a festival of football with the UEFA European Championship, and you can be assured that each national team coach will be using data analytics to assess their own and opposition teams and players strengths, weaknesses and winning formations.
As of May 2021, RegData completely replaced Gabriel as the FCA’s platform for data collection after a lengthy roll-out to 52,000 firms and 120,000 users. Firms and their users were moved to RegData in groups, based on their reporting requirements.
The FCA first published their duty of care paper in July 2018. Two years on it is now consulting on introducing a new consumer duty. This consultation ties in with the new FCA ‘outcomes’ focused principles based framework and is open until 31st July 2021 and following section 29 of the financial service act 2021, should be introduced by 1st August 2022.
With Daniel Kahneman’s co-authored latest book, ‘Noise’, we have another instalment for the case of behavioural science in decision making.