Regulatory Focus On Non-Financial Misconduct

The FCA's focus, in the six years since #MeToo began, upon tackling 'non-financial misconduct' (broadly, poor interpersonal behaviour) in the financial services sector has sometimes been said to be a bit odd and/or not the sort of thing that one would expect a financial services regulator to be focused upon.

In this article, we address some commonly-raised concerns about this particular regulatory focus area and offer our views on why we believe it has the potential to deliver positive change, where the FCA seems to be going with it, and what might be the upshot for authorised firms.

Why is it controversial?

There are undoubtedly a number of oddities and challenges concerning the FCA's work in this area so far (at least insofar as this is public). For many years, there was a troublesome lack of certainty on what the regulatory position was in respect of the relevance of non-financial misconduct to the FCA's regulatory framework and in particular the individual