In 2024 it announced 41 enforcement actions, and in the 2025 calendar year there were 33, both above its historic annual average of between 20 and 25.

“We are conducting fewer investigations, faster,”

Therese Chambers (one of two enforcement directors) said in a recent speech.

“But fewer investigations does not mean fewer outcomes. In fact, we are delivering more.”

“Fewer investigations are ending with no further action,”

she said.

“Historically less than a third of our enforcement operations ended with an FCA enforcement outcome. Today the majority do.”

The FCA grew fat in the first twenty years of this century. We saw their ineptitude in the mis-handling of the pension transfer crisis where schemes like BSPS and large banks were targeted by advisers and where the FCA had no means to stop bad actions by advisers or receiving retail pension plans.

I opened a company to offer savers advice on the VFM of pensions and in 2019 we entered the sandbox to test our work. We were eventually authorised to provide people with help but we could not progress that business and after years of struggling with bureaucracy we walked away. The FCA were not helpful in promoting us an innovative but keen to find holes to drive our peg into, none of their holes fitted us.

Now, eight years on from our first encounter we are looking to be authorised again. We want to run a business that is the proprietor of a CDC scheme that we hope thousands and in time millions of savers can use to convert pots into pensions and to build pensions without pots. The FCA are keen to help us create a mutual structure that allows employers to own the profits of the business and to use their skills to ensure the mutual acts for them as the providers of an employee benefit. We do not want to walk away from regulation as we had to, we want to work with the FCA because the FCA mutual unit gets what we are after.

You can read about this new FCA attitude in the FT this morning. It would be arrogant of me to say that my experience is indicative of a new approach by this regulator, but I am happy to say that I can endorse what the FT is saying.

I am not worried about being investigated, I am not running that kind of business and I look for the FCA to help me grow and grow responsibly. But I see “Financial Conduct Authority” as having another side, a side that encourages the kind of behaviours that get things done well. I would like to think that this time my business will be able to do the things that I feel need done without meeting belligerence and torpor but speed of engagement so that along with our principal work with the Pensions Regulator we can be ready to help people get pensions by this time next year.

Thanks to Martin Arnold, Financial Regulation Editor of the Financial Times for opening our business year with this cautiously optimistic view of a new FCA.