Guidance for finance leaders and the people who hire them
Most of what we publish starts as a conversation. A founder asking whether they need a full-time finance director or two days a week of someone considerably more experienced. A chair trying to work out why the board pack still arrives the night before. A compliance officer at a small broker wondering how to cover an SMF16 while they recruit. Those conversations repeat often enough that writing the answer down once is more useful than giving it forty times.
Search is a market with a lot of noise in it, and the easiest way to tell the difference between a firm that knows a sector and one that has simply bought the keyword is to read what they write. If we can explain why a particular hire works, you can judge whether we understand the problem before you ever pick up the phone.
Latest articles
Showing 37–48 of 707
FCA Regulated
The Financial Promotions Compliance Role: Skills and Career Path
The Financial Promotions Compliance Role: Skills and Career Path As the FCA's scrutiny of financial promotions has intensified, the people who manage them have becom…
FCA Regulated
Financial Promotions Record Keeping: What the FCA Expects
Financial Promotions Record Keeping: What the FCA Expects A compliant financial promotion that cannot be evidenced is, from a supervisory perspective, almost as expo…
FCA Regulated
AR Financial Promotions: Managing Principal Firm Liability
AR Financial Promotions: Managing Principal Firm Liability The appointed representative model lets an unauthorised firm conduct regulated business under the umbrella…
FCA Regulated
Social Media Financial Promotions: What Compliance Teams Must Know
Social Media Financial Promotions: What Compliance Teams Must Know Social media is where the financial promotions regime meets its hardest test. The channels are bui…
FCA Regulated
Common Financial Promotions Breaches and How to Avoid Them
Common Financial Promotions Breaches and How to Avoid Them Most financial promotions breaches are not the result of firms setting out to mislead. They are the result…
FCA Regulated
Fair, Clear and Not Misleading: Applying the FCA Standard
Fair, Clear and Not Misleading: Applying the FCA Standard Three words sit at the centre of UK financial promotions regulation: fair, clear and not misleading. They a…
Personal
Tesla Model 3 and P11d benefit
I first wrote about the Tesla Model 3 and its benefit in kind treatment back in 2019, when the car had only just arrived in the UK and the government had announced a…
FCA Regulated
New FCA Governance Guides for Regulated Firm Boards
Our sister practice Exec Capital — which specialises in C-suite and board-level executive search, including an extensive specialism in senior appointments at FCA-reg…
FCA Regulated
SUP 15: What Firms Must Notify the FCA and When
SUP 15 is the FCA's notification framework — the chapter of the Supervision Manual that sets out what regulated firms must tell the FCA, on what basis and by when. G…
FCA Regulated
FCA Perimeter: When Unauthorised Activity Triggers Risk
The regulatory perimeter is the boundary between activities that require FCA authorisation and those that do not. For businesses operating near that boundary — wheth…
FCA Regulated
Principle 11: What the FCA’s Disclosure Obligation Requires
Principle 11 creates one of the FCA's most open-ended but consequential obligations: the duty to deal with the regulator in an open and cooperative way and to disclo…
FCA Regulated
SYSC 4: How the FCA Expects Governance to Be Structured
SYSC 4 is the chapter of the FCA's Senior Management Arrangements, Systems and Controls sourcebook that sets out how the FCA expects regulated firms to govern themse…
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About the FD Capital blog
The useful information in this market is unevenly distributed. A private equity house doing its fourth CFO replacement knows roughly what good looks like. A founder-led business making its first senior finance hire usually does not, and the cost of getting it wrong falls hardest on exactly those businesses. Writing it down evens that up a little.
Articles are written by the FD Capital team and overseen by founder Adrian Lawrence FCA. Where we quote day rates, salaries or timescales, the figures come from live mandates rather than from a published survey.
Written and overseen by
Adrian Lawrence FCA
Adrian is the founder and Managing Director of FD Capital. A Chartered Accountant and ICAEW Fellow, he became a finance director at 28 and has spent more than 25 years at C-suite level, including as finance director of a listed company and of a private equity backed management buy-out. Every search is run by our specialist team, with Adrian overseeing each mandate.
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