The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ) reportedly struggles to process authorization approvals on time. According to Financial News London, top authorities at the FCA asked the City for help to speed up the approval process as there are many ‘poor quality’ paperwork applications.
“Unfortunately, too many of the applications we receive for authorization and/or registration are poor quality or incomplete. Firms can help us to help themselves by ensuring applications contain all the relevant information and are not missing any supporting documents. Missing information is one of the factors that slow down decisions,” an FCA document quoted by the Financial News London reads.
Overall, the average processing time for the approval process for individuals was 18.6 weeks in the first three months of 2021, which has increased from 14.5 weeks recorded in the three months leading up to June 2020. At that time, just under 85% of individual applications for an approved person status were being processed within the FCA’s statutory limit of 90 days in the first three months of 2021.
“To ensure we can meet our public commitment to operate a tougher gateway and increase the speed at which we allocate and determine cases, we are recruiting more authorization staff. We are also looking at whether there are opportunities for greater Automation for some elements of the authorization process,” it said.
FCA Reviewed 514 Financial Promotions in Q3 2021
Last month, the FCA disclosed its actions against financial promotions that were flagged for possible violations of the regulatory rules on Monday. According to the British regulator, it reviewed 514 financial promotions in the third quarter of 2021. These promotions were identified through both complaints the regulator had received and by proactively monitoring the industry activities.
The official announcement detailed that 51 percent of the total reports were received from customers, 25 percent came from internal areas of the FCA and 16 percent from other UK regulators. Additionally, the financial markets regulator proactively detected 2 percent of the complaints while the firms reported the remaining 6 percent of the complaints.
