Clifford Chance

On 5th April 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its Business Plan 2023/24.

Here are five key takeaways from an investigations and enforcement perspective:

• There will be an increase in the volume of proactive assessments of firms’ anti-money laundering systems and controls (and the FCA will continue to proactively supervise firms’ sanctions systems and controls)
• The FCA will create a dedicated commodities and fixed income market manipulation team and allocate increased enforcement resources to non-equity market manipulation cases (combined with improved data capture and analytics)
• In the primary markets there will be increased engagement with issuers on potentially misleading disclosures as well as increased scrutiny of PDMR dealings and unlawful disclosure of inside information
• The FCA will embed the Consumer Duty in every aspect of its work, including with a specialist interventions team within Enforcement "ready from day one of the duty coming into force to enable rapid action where immediate consumer harm is detected" as well as allocating more resources to traditional enforcement
• There will be more early intervention against problem firms under the threshold conditions and the FCA will expand the types of threshold condition breaches against which it will take action