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 built for brevity, immediacy and sharing — everything that works against balanced, properly contextualised communication about financial products. The FCA has …
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 of familiar, repeatable mistakes — the risk warning that is technically present but practically invisible, the past-performance figure …
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 appear in COBS 4.2.1R of the FCA Handbook, they govern every communication a regulated firm makes to a customer, …
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-regulated firms — has published a significant new series of Knowledge Centre guides covering the regulatory framework for board and senior management function …
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. Getting SUP 15 notifications right is a core compliance obligation. Getting them wrong — or …
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 — whether through deliberate product design, rapid growth or genuine uncertainty about the applicable rules — crossing it without authorisation creates serious …
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 disclose anything of which the FCA would reasonably expect notice. Understanding what this means in practice — and …
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 themselves. It is not a bureaucratic checklist — it is the FCA’s articulation of what effective governance actually looks …
FCA Gateway: What a Strong CEO and Chair Statement Needs
The CEO and Chair Statements are the FCA’s window into whether the firm’s leadership genuinely understands its regulatory obligations — or whether it is relying on a compliance function and legal advisers to navigate a process the senior management have not engaged with themselves. As …
Variation of Permission: When You Need One and How to Apply
Varying a Part 4A permission is one of the most common post-authorisation regulatory steps for growing FCA-regulated firms — and one of the most frequently misunderstood. Getting it right means understanding which activities actually require a VoP and submitting a well-prepared application. A Variation of …
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