Global Trustee and Fiduciary Services Bite-Sized Issue 4 2025

13 QUICK LINKS BENCHMARKSREGULATION CMU/SIU DORA FINTECH IOSCO MIFID II/MIFIR SUSTAINABLE FINANCE/ESG ASIA PACIFIC EUROPE NORTH AMERICA UNITED KINGDOM Global Trustee and Fiduciary Services Bite-Sized | Issue 4 | 2025 UNITED KINGDOM FCA Launches 5-year Strategy to Support Growth and Improve Lives On 25 March 2025, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) launched a new 5-year strategy to deepen trust, rebalance risk, support growth and improve lives. The FCA says it will focus on four priorities: • Be a smarter regulator ; predictable, purposeful and proportionate. The FCA will improve its processes and embrace technology to become more efficient and effective. • Support sustained economic growth , by enabling investment, innovation and ensuring the continued competitiveness of the UK’s world-leading financial services. • Help consumers navigate their financial lives by working with industry to boost trust, product innovation and ensuring the right information and support is available for people to take financial decisions. • Fight financial crime , focusing on those who seek to use the fact they are regulated to do harm. It will go further to disrupt criminals and support firms to be an effective line of defence. The FCA says that the strategy sets out how it will change how it supervises to be more efficient. This includes taking a less intensive approach for those firms seeking to do the right thing, significantly streamlining how it sets its supervisory priorities, and reviewing whether it can stop requiring certain data returns. It will also digitise and simplify the authorisation processes so it is easier and quicker to apply, the information received is better quality and follow-up requests are reduced. The FCA also says that it plans to invest in its technology, people and systems. It will support its people to build their digital capability and adopt new approaches to allow it to better handle the 100,000 cases it assesses every year. This will enable it to act faster and more assertively where harm is greatest. Finally, the FCA notes that the new strategy builds on its achievements over the course of its previous 3-year strategy. These include making the biggest changes to the listing regime in over three decades, introducing the Consumer Duty to set higher standards of consumer protection, authorising firms that meet the regulator’s high standards more quickly, and keeping more potentially harmful firms out of financial services. Link to Strategy 2025-2030 here FCA Outlines Next Steps on Consumer Duty Rule Review On 25 March 2025, the FCA published ‘FS25/2: Immediate areas for action and further plans for reviewing FCA requirements following introduction of the Consumer Duty.’ The FCA says that the proposals are part of its work to streamline its rules, reduce burdens on businesses, and improve outcomes for consumers following the introduction of the Consumer Duty. The FCA states that there was clear feedback in its call for input that now is not the time for wholesale changes to the FCA’s rules. The FCA says it will continue to engage with industry and others to get the balance right, without a widespread overhaul. The FCA’s plans include: • Making it easier to navigate regulations for consumer finance, investment and mortgages firms by planning to retire more than 100 pages of outdated guidance. • Withdrawing hundreds of supervisory publications. • Reviewing current prescriptive disclosure rules to give firms more flexibility to tailor communications to customers’ needs and preferences, like online and digital transactions. • Revisiting rules for businesses with customers outside the UK, for example looking at whether insurance firms need to apply UK rules for their overseas customers.