The Financial Conduct Authority regulates the conduct of financial services firms in the United Kingdom and acts as prudential supervisor for the firms that fall outside the PRA's remit. It was created in 2013, when the Financial Services Act 2012 split the former FSA into a conduct authority and a prudential one. Its statutory objectives are consumer protection, market integrity and effective competition, and it supervises tens of thousands of firms — from global investment banks to consumer credit brokers.
What the FCA publishes
- The FCA Handbook and every instrument that amends it
- Consultation papers (CP), discussion papers (DP) and the policy statements (PS) that close them out
- Final notices and supervisory notices, the public record of enforcement
- Dear CEO letters and portfolio strategy letters setting supervisory priorities by sector
- Market Watch and Primary Market Bulletin newsletters
- Perimeter reports, thematic reviews and multi-firm review findings
Why it matters for compliance teams
Since Brexit the FCA has been building a rulebook that deliberately diverges from the EU one, which means any firm operating on both sides now has to track two moving targets. The Consumer Duty in particular shifted a large part of UK conduct supervision from rule-following to outcome-evidencing, and much of what tells you how the FCA reads that standard sits in Dear CEO letters and review findings rather than in the Handbook itself.
Seqlense DOC tracks all of it — Handbook instruments, the CP/PS pipeline, enforcement notices and supervisory correspondence — from the official source, indexed and searchable alongside the EU material it increasingly diverges from.