A View From The Exchange: FCA enforcement update – a state of equilibrium?

With the start of another school year, we welcomed the FCA back from their summer holidays with another FOIA requesting the most up-to-date enforcement statistics.

The FCA have duly obliged and when comparing the data against previous statistics (including as part of the Annual Report, published July 2025), we can see that Therese Chambers and Steve Smart have almost reached their goal of getting case numbers back under control.

In the enforcement data provided in the Annual Report, the FCA stated that "as at 31 March 2025, we had 130 open enforcement operations, down from 188 in 2023/24". Noting that a single enforcement operation may involve investigations into multiple firms and / or individuals at any one time, we asked the FCA to confirm how many investigations the 130 open enforcement operations related to. The FCA have confirmed that as of 31 March 2025 there were 381 cases, reducing to 376 as of 31 July 2025. This is a huge decrease in caseload compared to the 591 open cases in 2023 around the point in time that the Co-heads of Enforcement came into role.

Out of the 376 cases open as of 31 July 2025:

• There were 123 firm cases: 35 into regulated firms and 88 into unregulated firms and 253 individual cases.
• The majority of the cases related to unauthorised business (178), retail conduct (44), financial crime (40) and insider dealing (37).

Since our last FOIA, between 1 November 2024 and 31 July 2025, the FCA has opened 71 investigations into 45 individuals, 6 regulated firms and 20 unregulated firms. This is an increase from 29 investigations opened between 1 March 2024 to 31 October 2024.

Of the 45 individual cases opened, 7 related to senior managers (including 3 CEOs) and 1 related to a conduct rule staff member. This is a big uptick in cases against SMFs as we know that the FCA had only opened one investigation into a senior manager prior to this date in 2024 (compared to 11 in 2023).

Our key takeaways from this new data are:

• The rate at which the FCA is reducing its caseload has slowed and more cases are now being opened. We sense that the FCA has reached an equilibrium such that its case portfolio numbers will now remain more stable and may increase the FCA's appetite to open new cases.
• Following the closure of a large proportion of its legacy cases in the last two years, we expect to see the average case duration dropping (although for the 101 investigations closed between 1 November 2024 and 31 July 2025 the average case duration remained extremely high at 62 months). We expect that investigations opened more recently will continue to be completed significantly faster than recent averages - the FCA has been vocal on a number of occasions recently on the speed at which it is now reaching outcomes.
• Our belief is that, within the regulated sector, the FCA is continuing to refer cases to enforcement where the firm has clearly admitted wrongdoing resulting in no real investigation being required and the enforcement process therefore largely involves documenting the breaches in an acceptable way and negotiation of the penalty.
• The FCA has commenced a small number of cases against SMFs which may be a sign that individual accountability is a renewed focus now that the unwieldy case numbers are under control. However, given the SMF roles undertaken by those placed under investigation, we suspect that they work at smaller firms rather than major financial institutions.