Regulatory Initiatives Grid - 9th Edition (December 2025)

We are pleased to introduce the 9^th edition of the Regulatory Initiatives Grid, setting out the regulatory pipeline over the next 2 years. The Grid promotes transparency and predictability for the financial services industry and other stakeholders. A clear and stable regulatory environment, which allows the industry to plan and gives consumers confidence, is important in facilitating growth.

This edition features 124 live initiatives, a reduction in the total number of live initiatives since the last edition of 13%.

Forum members remain committed to advancing their individual objectives and as part of this are supporting the Government’s growth agenda. Members are all delivering against the commitments made in individual responses to the Prime Minister’s request for ideas to promote growth and competitiveness in UK financial services, and on the Government’s Regulatory Action Plan and the Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy.

The Grid includes initiatives designed to ensure financial stability, which is a necessary foundation for growth, and initiatives designed to increase regulatory efficiency, facilitate innovation and increase consumer confidence and investment.

• Initiatives supporting financial stability and regulatory efficiency include the continued implementation of Basel 3.1 standards and the Strong and Simple framework, as well as Prospectus Regime Reform and Wholesale Markets Review.
   
• There are initiatives designed to support innovation, for example those relating to stablecoins. The Grid also includes significant reform to help the payments sector deliver better payment solutions and strengthen the UK’s position as a global leader through the National Payments Vision. The Grid also includes reforms to develop a UK captives insurance regime.
   
• There are initiatives aimed at supporting investment – such as the Advice Guidance Boundary Review which will help build consumers’ confidence to invest. There are also reforms designed to help consumers navigate their financial lives, such as the new regulation of Buy Now Pay Later. 

Wherever possible, we continue to work together to seek to streamline regulatory initiatives and minimise duplicative requests of market participants. This edition includes 45 joint initiatives, over a third of the total. These efforts have helped lower the total number of initiatives featured in this edition of the Grid.

For example, the Pensions Reform Steering Group, which brings together the DWP, HMT, FCA and TPR will ensure Pensions Reforms are delivered in a coordinated way. In other instances, the BoE, FCA and PRA are working closely on the ‘Incident, Outsourcing and Third-Party Reporting’ initiative and Transforming Data Collections. 

We will continue our efforts to deliver our objectives, support growth and bolster the UK’s position as a world-leading financial centre. 

The Financial Services Regulatory Initiatives Forum was launched to further strengthen coordination between its 9 members. The FCA and Bank of England /PRA co-chair the Forum which is made up of representatives from:

• The Bank of England
• Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)
• Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
• Financial Reporting Council (FRC)
• His Majesty’s Treasury (HMT)
• Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
• Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)
• Payment Systems Regulator (PSR)
• The Pensions Regulator (TPR)

The Forum regularly reviews its membership. While there are no current plans to extend the members of the Forum, the Grid may include initiatives from a wider set of UK bodies based on their occasional participation in the Forum.

The Forum’s terms of reference will help users to understand the role of the Forum and the nature of this publication.

The Grid presents expected timeframes for regulatory initiatives led by one or more Forum members at the time of publication. The Grid will only include information that meets set criteria.

To be included in the Grid, initiatives must:

Be public information – The Grid is not an announcement tool. Stakeholders are usually informed of initiatives featured on the Grid through Forum members’ regular channels of communication.

Have an operational impact – Forum members will include initiatives expected to have a significant operational impact during implementation. This means the Grid will feature initiatives believed to take up a substantial amount of firms’ time and resources during implementation.

The Grid does not include:

• initiatives led by international bodies, except where Forum members are playing a key role in calibrating their implementation in the UK
• enforcement actions
• supervisory activities (since timing and operational impact are firm-specific)
• market sensitive information

The Grid is published twice a year. Each edition captures the regulatory landscape at the point of publication. The initiatives and their timings in each edition, may change or discontinue based on operational decisions.

Editions will not be updated after publication to reflect the impacts of these decisions or to add initiatives announced later.

To help industry continue to plan effectively, each authority contributing to the Grid provides channels where industry can keep up to date with changes to planned activity or new announcements:

• Sign up to Regulation Round-up, the FCA’s monthly newsletter to firms on key topics, events and sector news and stay up to date with the FCA’s latest news and new publications, including consultations, guidance and notices and decisions.
   
• Find up-to-date information on all the guidance the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is developing, including what is being worked on and expected publication dates. Updates are made regularly so you can track progress with confidence.
   
• See the Pension Regulator’s (TPR) news, updates, and best practice reports. On the consultations webpage you can read relevant documents, find out how to respond to open consultations, and see our responses to closed consultations and discussion papers.
   
• Stay up to date with the latest publications from the Bank of England and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Access policy publications, quarterly bulletins and working papers from the Bank of England, and find consultation papers, supervisory and policy statements from the Prudential Regulation Authority.
   
• Find the latest information on the Financial Reporting Council’s (FRC) active consultations, including briefing material and structured engagement activity.
   
• See the latest information on HM Treasury policy papers and consultations.

The Grid is organised by sections, often determined by sector.

The ‘Multi-sector’ section covers initiatives that span more than one sector. There are sector-specific sections which cover:

• Banking, credit and lending
• Payments and cryptoassets
• Insurance and reinsurance
• Investment management
• Pensions and retirement income
• Retail investments
• Wholesale financial markets 

The 2 largest sections (Multi-sector and Banking, credit and lending) are broken down into additional sub-categories, which group similar initiatives to make them more accessible for users. 

The Grid contains the following information about regulatory initiatives:

• Lead – which institution(s) is taking the initiative forward. Organisations are listed in alphabetical order for jointly led initiatives.
   
• Initiative – a high-level description of the initiative.
   
• Expected key milestones – the specific timing of milestones, for example closing dates for consultation papers, if these are known.
   
• Indicative impact on firms – this is shown as ‘higher’ (H), ‘lower’ (L) or ‘unknown’ (U) on a relative basis amongst initiatives.
   
• Quarter-by-quarter – a breakdown of the next 3 quarters (October 2025 to June 2026), a column covering the following 6 months (July 2026 to December 2026) and a column for beyond that horizon.
   
• Interest to consumers/consumer organisations – indicates where we expect an initiative is likely to be of interest to consumers and consumer organisations.
   
• Change in timing – indicates that there has been a substantive change in timings for this initiative since the previously published edition of the Grid.
   
• New initiative added to the Grid – indicates that this initiative was not included in the previous edition of the Grid.

The Grid also features an annex to highlight where initiatives included in the previous Grid have been removed because they have been completed or stopped. 

• Edition 1: May 2020 (PDF)
• Edition 2: September 2020 (PDF)
• Edition 3: May 2021 (PDF) and Edition 3: May 2021 (XLSX)
• Edition 4: November 2021 (PDF) and Edition 4: November 2021 (XLSX)
• Edition 5: May 2022 (PDF) and Edition 5: May 2022 (XLSX)
• Edition 6: February 2023 (PDF) and Edition 6: February 2023 (XLSX)
• July 2023 update (PDF)
• Edition 7: November 2023 (PDF) and Edition 7: November 2023 (XLSX)
• Interim update - October 2024
• Edition 8: April 2025 (PDF) and Edition 8: April 2025 (XLSX)

• Meeting minutes - November 2025 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - February 2025 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - November 2023 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - February 2023 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - May 2022 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - October 2021 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - April 2021 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - September 2020 (PDF)
• Meeting minutes - April 2020 (PDF)