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 exposed as a non-compliant one. The FCA expects firms not only to communicate promotions that are fair, clear and not misleading, but to keep records that demonstrate they did — what was approved, by whom, on what basis, and when. When the regulator asks a firm to account for a promotion, the record is the answer. This guide sets out what the FCA expects of financial promotions record keeping, why it matters as much as the promotion itself, and how to build a record-keeping discipline that stands up to scrutiny.

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Why Record Keeping Matters

Financial promotions record keeping serves three purposes. It evidences compliance, giving the firm the means to demonstrate to the FCA that a promotion met the standard and was properly approved. It supports the firm’s own governance, providing the audit trail that lets senior managers satisfy themselves the process is working. And it underpins accountability, because under the senior managers regime an individual is responsible for the firm’s financial promotions, and that person needs records to evidence that they took reasonable steps. The FCA’s record-keeping expectations sit within COBS and the wider Handbook, available through the FCA Handbook.

The connection to senior manager accountability is important. The reasonable steps defence under the senior managers regime depends on being able to show what was done. A compliance oversight function holder asked to account for a promotion that went wrong will rely heavily on the records of how the firm’s process operated.

What the FCA Expects You to Keep

While the precise requirements vary by activity, the FCA’s expectations centre on a firm being able to reconstruct the life of a promotion. In practice, a robust record should capture the promotion itself in its final, published form; the approval — who approved it, when, and confirmation that it met the fair, clear and not misleading standard; the basis for any claims made, particularly performance figures or comparisons, with the supporting evidence; the intended audience and channel; and any subsequent amendments or withdrawals and the reasons for them.

For firms approving the promotions of others — including unauthorised firms under the financial promotion approval regime, or appointed representatives — the records must also evidence the due diligence and ongoing monitoring behind that approval. This connects to the principal-firm responsibilities covered in our guide on AR financial promotions and principal firm liability.

How Long to Keep Records

Retention periods depend on the type of business and the relevant Handbook provisions, with some categories of promotion subject to longer retention than others. As a general discipline, firms should retain financial promotions records for the period required by the applicable rules and, where there is any doubt, err toward longer retention rather than shorter. The cost of keeping a record is trivial against the cost of being unable to produce one when the FCA asks. Firms should confirm the specific retention requirements that apply to their permissions and product types rather than assume a single blanket period.

The Approval Record

The heart of financial promotions record keeping is the approval record — the documented confirmation that a competent person assessed the promotion against the standard and approved it before publication. A strong approval record identifies the individual who approved the promotion, the date, the version approved, and ideally a brief note of the assessment, particularly where a judgement call was involved. This is the document that most directly evidences that the firm’s process worked.

Weak approval records — an undated email, an unclear “looks fine”, no link to the specific version published — are a common finding. They leave the firm unable to demonstrate, after the fact, that the published promotion was the one that was reviewed, or that the reviewer genuinely assessed it against the standard.

Substantiating Claims

Where a promotion makes factual claims — performance figures, comparisons, statistics, statements about features — the firm should keep the evidence that substantiated those claims at the time of approval. If the FCA challenges a claim, the firm needs to show not just that it approved the promotion, but that it had a reasonable basis for the claim when it did so. This is particularly important for performance data, where the source, the period and the methodology should all be recorded.

Common Record-Keeping Failures

The record-keeping failures the FCA most often identifies are practical rather than conceptual. The most common is the missing link between the approval and the published version: a firm can show that it approved a promotion, but not that the version published was the version approved, because intervening edits were not captured. Another is the undated or unattributed approval — a record showing that a promotion was approved, but not by whom or when, which undermines the evidential value entirely. A third is the absent substantiation: a performance claim approved without the supporting data retained, leaving the firm unable to show it had a reasonable basis at the time.

Fragmented records are a fourth recurring problem. Where the promotion, its approval, its evidence and its amendment history live in different systems, inboxes and drives, the firm may technically hold all the information but be unable to assemble the complete picture quickly when the FCA asks. The regulator’s expectation is not just that records exist but that the firm can produce a coherent, complete account of a promotion on request — which is why consolidation into a single workflow matters.

Records and the Approver Regime

Record keeping has taken on additional weight with the introduction of the regulatory gateway for firms approving the financial promotions of unauthorised persons. A firm that approves another party’s promotions must be able to evidence the due diligence behind that approval, its ongoing monitoring, and its basis for being satisfied the promotion meets the standard. The record is the mechanism by which an approver demonstrates it discharged this responsibility, and the expectations here are demanding precisely because the approver is vouching for content it did not originate. Firms operating as approvers should treat their record-keeping discipline as central to the permission rather than incidental to it.

Building the Discipline

Good financial promotions record keeping is systematic, not ad hoc. The strongest firms use a defined workflow — often a dedicated system or log — that captures each promotion, its approval, its supporting evidence and its lifecycle in one place, rather than relying on individuals to retain emails and files. The system should make it straightforward to retrieve the complete record of any promotion on request, which is exactly what an FCA query demands.

As with every aspect of financial promotions, the quality of the record keeping tracks the quality of the people operating it. A compliance function that understands why the records matter — and treats them as integral to the reasonable steps defence rather than as paperwork — will maintain them properly. This is part of the broader skill set covered in our guide on the financial promotions compliance role, and it rests on the same standard explained in our guide on applying the fair, clear and not misleading standard.

How FD Capital Helps

FD Capital recruits the compliance and senior manager talent that FCA-regulated firms rely on to maintain robust financial promotions controls and records. Every candidate is personally assessed by Adrian Lawrence FCA, whose chartered-accountant background gives FD Capital a depth in regulated-finance assessment that generalist recruiters cannot match.

Related guides: Fair, Clear and Not Misleading | Common Financial Promotions Breaches | Social Media Financial Promotions | AR Financial Promotions | The Financial Promotions Compliance Role