Icon smarter regulation
How we work, our capabilities and technology must enable us to do more, faster. The way we operate can open the way to greater innovation, more investment and support economic growth. We must be cost effective and proportionate, including in how we collect and use data.
In year 1 of our strategy[1], we’ll know we’re delivering by continuing to track our existing operational metrics, looking for:
- Maintained high adherence to service standards in our operating metrics[2].
- Continued improvement in metrics that show we are delivering our secondary objective on international competitiveness and growth (SICGO)[3].
We also track the following metric:
| Metric description | Source | Baseline value |
|---|---|---|
| Continued improvement in firms’ perceived effectiveness of the FCA in regulating the financial services industry | FCA and Practitioner Panel survey[4] | 2024/25
|
Why we have chosen these metrics and limitations
The Operating Service and SICGO metrics give a broad view of our performance.
There are 51 operating service metrics, covering our supervision hub, how promptly we authorise firms and individuals, legislative requirements, and more. There are 5 categories:
- Open communication: We assess our performance through standards, such as the timeliness of our responses to consumers, firms, MPs and others.
- Enabling business: Our standards capture how promptly we authorise firms and individuals.
- Regulating existing businesses: Our standards assess, for example, how quickly we process requests for variation of permission.
- Listing transactions: We review and approve documents in connection with corporate finance transactions, assess listing eligibility for new applicants and provide guidance on our rules. There are both voluntary targets and statutory deadlines.
- Enforcement data: This highlights the types of action we take, including Threshold Conditions cases, interventions action and enforcement operations.
Published following the Treasury’s call for proposals on measuring the success of our secondary objective, SICGO metrics focus on our operational efficiency, regulatory impact, data collection and innovation.
We also track the perceived effectiveness of the FCA in regulating the financial services industry through the annual FCA and Practitioner Panel survey of the firms we regulate. We want to see continued improvement in this metric as we become a more efficient and effective regulator.
In our first year of our strategy, we will also develop new metrics to assess how effectively and efficiently we’re performing our role.
Historical values
Graph 1
Chart
Data table
Question: Overall, from your firm’s perspective, how effective has the FCA been in regulating the financial services industry in the last year? All FCA regulated firms excluding consumer credit firms: Fixed - 2016 (62), 2017 (74), 2018 (65), 2019 (71), 2021 (58), 2022-23 (60), 2023-24 (47), 2024-25(46). Flexible - 2016 (3,295), 2017 (2,156), 2018 (2,548), 2019 (2,817), 2021 (3,551), 2022-23 (4,227), 2023-24 (6,561), 2024-25(5,349). Mean score: 10 = Extremely effective; 1= not at all effective.
Firms were asked to rate how effective the FCA has been in regulating the financial services industry in the last year. The mean effectiveness score for fixed firms has fallen from 7.2 in 2023-24 to 6.8 in 2024-25, while the mean score among flexible firms has not changed since 2023-24. The mean score for flexible firms was 7.2 in both 2023-24 and 2024-25.