The FCA’s five year strategy (2025-2030)

On 25 March 2025, the FCA published a Strategy Paper, launching a new five year strategy that will run until 2030. 

The FCA says it will focus on four priorities:

1. Be a smarter regulator; predictable, purposeful and proportionate. The FCA will improve its processes and embrace technology to become more efficient and effective. 
   • The FCA says it will change the way it supervises firms. “We will significantly streamline how we set our supervisory priorities, publishing a small number of market reports once a year detailing the risks and opportunities we see. We will also share more insights from our supervisory work, helping a wider group learn lessons from the experience of others. In enforcement, this focus means a streamlined portfolio of cases, with the same number of outcomes but delivered faster.”
   • The reporting obligations on regulated firms are likely to be reduced.
2. Support sustained economic growth, by enabling investment, innovation and ensuring the continued competitiveness of the UK’s world-leading financial services.
   • The idea of the FCA explicitly supporting growth is an entirely new approach.  It has not been mentioned in previous strategy reports, but reflects the changes to the FCA’s statutory objectives since the last strategy document.
   • In terms of specific initiatives, the FCA will (i) integrate the Payment Systems Regulator and deliver the National Payments Vision; (ii) launch Open Finance – the idea being that more seamless data sharing could unlock product innovation; (iii) reform rules (e.g. for commercial insurance and asset management) to strip out redundant requirements (iv) review the redress system.
3. Help consumers navigate their financial lives by working with industry to boost trust, product innovation and ensuring the right information and support is available for people to take financial decisions.
   • The FCA will continue to focus on fair value, to promote trust.
   • The FCA will look again at its rules to make sure they allow for product innovation and widened access.  As an example, the FCA will be reviewing mortgage affordability requirements.
   • The FCA wants to work with industry to help people get the support and information that they need to make decisions.  A new regime for targeted support is being introduced.
   • Building on the FCA’s previous strategy and underpinning the above, the Consumer Duty will be made integral to firms’ treatment of customers.
   • The FCA will support the government’s financial inclusion strategy
4. Fight financial crime, focusing on those who seek to use the fact they are regulated to do harm. It will go further to disrupt criminals and support firms to be an effective line of defence.

Three other points of focus emerge from the FCA’s Strategy Paper:

• The FCA is encouraging a debate about risk.  In his evidence to the Treasury Committee on 25 March 2025, the Chief Executive of the FCA said that the FCA was “rebalancing its approach to risk” so that it supports consumers and the economy.  In that context, the Strategy Paper says that consumers may need to take risks and acknowledges that while the majority may benefit, a minority may not get the outcome for which they hoped – which may herald a new approach towards customer responsibility and to the possibility of customers having bad outcomes without the regulated firm being considered at fault. It will be interesting to see how the FCA reconciles this with its commitment in the Strategy Paper to making the Consumer Duty – with its requirement for firms to act to deliver good outcomes – integral to firms’ treatment of customers.
• The FCA is looking for a ‘smart data revolution’.   That will apply for Open Banking, and will be extended to include Open Finance more broadly – with an Open Finance roadmap to be published within a year and the regulatory foundations for the first Open Finance Scheme expected to be in place by the end of 2027 (prioritising its use for small business lending).
• The FCA will continue to aim to be an international regulator and to meet international standards.  However, it also notes that in an era of heightened geopolitical instability it may choose to make progress on some issues with a smaller group of like-minded jurisdictions.  This may point to more progress being made on bilateral relationships.  The FCA also says that it will establish a permanent presence in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific for the first time.

This is only the second time that the FCA has set out its strategy.  The previous version covered the three year period between 2022 and 2025, and it is noticeable that two of the three priorities from that version – namely (1) reducing and preventing serious harm, and (2) setting and testing higher standards – do not explicitly form part of the new Strategy Paper.  

The current emphasis is more on supporting growth and removing regulatory burdens, which is consistent with the FCA’s new secondary objective (introduced in 2023) of facilitating international competitiveness and growth, and in keeping with other recent FCA and government pronouncements, including the UK government’s Action Plan on a new approach to ensuring regulators and regulation support growth.  This suggests that we could see changes in the way that the FCA regulates firm.

Authored by Dominic Hill and Virginia Montgomery.