Speech by Sarah Pritchard, deputy chief executive, at a Breakfast Briefing at The Whitehall Industry Group.
Speaker: Sarah Pritchard, deputy chief executive
Event: Breakfast Briefing at The Whitehall Industry Group
Delivered: 8 July 2026
Note: This is a drafted speech and may differ from the delivered version
Reading time: 8 minutes
Key messages:
- The FCA operates at a significant scale, and uses data, technology and smarter systems to deliver more, faster. We encourage firms to engage with our innovation and pre-application services to help us go further.
- We want to see a fair, thriving financial services market that works for consumers and the wider economy.
- Trust in financial markets depends on transparency. It is crucial that we be open about what we are doing, why and how well it is working.
Let me start with a confession.
I studied Maths at A Level, but like many, I hadn’t thought much about it again. Then I sat with my boys at the kitchen table and helped them with their homework.
I was struck by how differently teachers approach problem-solving now: with creativity.
As a student, I was told to choose between arts and sciences. When I did both, my school wasn’t thrilled.
But it taught me to take a wider view. To use all of my skills. And to find new ways to solve problems.
That’s also the approach the FCA is taking to regulation.
Because the problems in front of us are big, including the UK’s productivity and growth challenge.
A Millennium Prize Problem[2] if there ever was one – a classic question, unresolved for years, with experts always chipping away at it.
And you are who we need to help us crack equations like this.
So today, I want to show you how we’re approaching them.
How we’re balancing growth, risk and trust to help consumers navigate their financial lives, and what that looks like in practice.
Understanding the equation
As everyone who has wrestled with a problem knows, getting to the right answer is about more than just understanding the question.
It’s about having a firm grasp on your constants.
We’re working with 2. And they are, admittedly, significant.
The first is our vision: deepening trust, rebalancing risk, supporting growth and improving lives.
We want to see a fair, thriving financial services market that works for consumers and the wider economy.
The second is our priorities: supporting growth, fighting financial crime, helping consumers and being a smarter regulator.
We’re now in the second year of our 5-year strategy (PDF)[3], which shapes how we engage, prioritise and make decisions.
But it isn’t a fixed formula. Markets are always shifting. New threats and opportunities emerge daily, and with AI, faster than ever.
So, while our strategy to 2030 provides consistency and predictability in our focus and work, we know good regulation means being both principled and agile – willing to pivot when we need to.
Solving for both variables
Just as I didn’t have to choose between arts and sciences, we don’t have to choose between protecting consumers and supporting growth.
But we do need to rebalance risk.
I know some people find that phrase uncomfortable.
Not every risk can – or should – be eliminated.
But being overly cautious has costs too: consumers underserved, a lack of innovation in markets, and investment flowing elsewhere.
Choices have to be made.
And we want them to be made openly – showing our working and being explicit about the trade-offs.
We’re playing our part.
In January 2025, we outlined nearly 50 pro-growth measures in a letter to the Prime Minister that spanned:
- Digital innovation.
- Simpler, more proportionate regulation.
- Easier routes to start up and scale.
- Improved access to capital, liquidity and market data; and
- A stronger international presence.
By December, we had delivered the vast majority of these and more.
Including Targeted Support[4], which went live with new legislation in April to help consumers make more informed investment decisions.
Some firms were approved on the very first working day of the regime – a sign of our operational mindset.
Let me be clear: publishing rules is not success.
Success is getting firms authorised, Targeted Support launching, and consumers making better financial decisions.
Of course, Targeted Support will take time to scale.
But 7 firms are already approved, and 23 more have applied for authorisation or are participating in our pre-application support service (PASS)[5].
We’ve also expanded our innovation services.
Our Scale-up Unit[6] is there to support firms as they grow and navigate regulation.
PASS has expanded, with over 300 firms applying for free, tailored authorisation help.
We’re supporting the live testing of AI in financial services, including through our AI Supercharged sandbox with Nvidia[7], which is making advanced compute power available to smaller firms.
And later this year, we’ll launch a new Climate Scenarios Sandbox cohort to help drive innovation in the markets and support firms to better understand and manage climate risks.
We’re already seeing results.
London is ranked second globally in the Global Financial Centres Index (PDF)[8], and is one of the only centres to improve its rating this year.
Our most recent Practitioner Panel survey results tell a similar story.
More than three-quarters of firms with full permissions say the FCA is delivering well against its sustained growth objective.
And confidence in us as a regulator is up across the board.
Encouraging progress.
But our focus on becoming a smarter, faster and more data-led regulator remains.
The arithmetic
There has sometimes been a perception that we just write rules at the FCA.
That is not true: we’re an operational agency, the same way the National Crime Agency and HMRC are.
And that calls for a particular type of thinking and mindset – using data to spot problems, and deciding which ones to solve first, when to intervene, and when to hold back.
But most people don’t see the scale of what we do, so let me show our working.
With a team of around 5,500 people across London, Leeds and Edinburgh, we currently regulate over 35,000 firms.
Another 60,000 businesses and 100,000 senior individuals are set to come under our scope in the coming years. That’s more than can fit inside the World Cup final stadium – and we expect to deliver within our existing headcount, through smarter use of technology at scale.
And for every pound we spent on running costs in 2025/26, we delivered the equivalent of over £7 in benefits to consumers, firms and the wider economy.
That’s £5.6bn in a single year – or nearly £11,000 every minute.
Still, we’re constantly looking for ways to do more. Especially when it comes to supervision.
We look into thousands of leads every year, and are using data, AI and improved systems to identify harm earlier, simplify workflows and intervene more precisely.
Take our reviews of Professional Indemnity Insurance. Documentary reviews, which used to take about 3 hours, now take 30 minutes.
Not all leads are equal. By bringing together the right data to identify and triage our lowest-risk cases, we’ve cut processing times from averages of 4 hours to just 6 minutes.
And reduced the share of low-risk cases in our supervisory caseload by 38%.
But we haven’t just saved that capacity. We’ve redirected it so we can get to the more significant matters, faster.
Nearly 40% of our caseload is now made up of cases and risks we have proactively identified using intelligence, data and firm engagement – up from 28% this time last year.
These are just a few examples of how we are being a smarter regulator.
Order of operations
But even with technology and system improvements, you can see that on this scale, it’s impossible for the FCA to be everywhere at once.
Our intelligence infrastructure has processed more than 52 million records. Chasing every lead isn’t feasible.
So, instead of spreading ourselves too thin, we’re making evidence, threat, and impact-based choices about where we focus. And working with other operational partners to reduce harm system-wide.
This doesn’t mean less effort.
It means more purposeful, focused effort.
The numbers speak for themselves:
On enforcement, we secured 17 criminal convictions, issued £129 million in fines, and returned £82 million to wronged consumers in the last financial year.
And while supervision is largely confidential – and for good reason – we’re choosing to be more open about our work in this area. Our Enforcement Watch[9], which we published yesterday, explains how we are using supervisory tools to drive improvements under the Consumer Duty[10], and provides an update on our enforcement pipeline.
For example, we secured £194m for customers[11] after complaints about poor affordability checks by a guarantor lender.
Over the last 12 months, we have amended or withdrawn nearly 10,000 financial promotions to protect consumers.
Finally, working with the NCA and using data analytics, we identified 30 suspected unregistered crypto brokers and a payments institution believed to be enabling criminal activity. And acted.
We know how much this kind of transparency builds trust with consumers, and in our markets.
Which is why we are committed to it.
We report annually on progress against the outcomes we are tracking in our strategy.
We appear before Parliament frequently. In 2025, we participated in 11 select committees.
I’ve personally appeared 5 times in the last 12 months, and have another slated for this month.
And we publish over 50 operating service metrics, including our authorisation targets.
Between January and March, 99.2% of authorisation applications were determined against existing statutory deadlines.
With our operational mindset, we’re already preparing for new, more ambitious targets.
They're not yet in force, but we're already reporting against them in the name of transparency – and the data shows we are determining 97.6% of applications within those deadlines.
Conclusion: Solving the problem, together
So we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made so far.
But we know the equation isn’t solved, and the variables will continue to change. And we are not resting on our laurels.
It takes the best and brightest minds, working together, to solve the difficult problems.
So, please, continue to engage with us. Tell us what is and isn’t working. Respond to our consultations. And hold us to account on the outcomes we have committed to.
At the kitchen table with my boys, the rule was always: show your working.
Let’s hold each other to that.
