UK FCA unveils 2020/2021 business plan

OPINION: Earlier this week the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued its business plan for 2020-2021, which outlines their priorities for the financial year including the industry sectors that it will focus its attention on,  its key financial crime prevention priorities and specific activities it plans to undertake.

The FCA’s key priorities are threefold:- sharing intelligence with the Government and other relevant agencies, using intelligence, data and technology to improve our approach to anti-money laundering, bribery and corruption and strengthening their approach to tackling fraud by developing our understanding of the risks in specific financial sectors and ensuring firms have appropriate safeguards in place.

It was exciting to hear that the key specific activities the FCA has committed to undertake is to improve their AML capabilities through the adoption of technology specifically for assessing the effectiveness of a firms’ own systems and controls, which is precisely what Arctic Intelligence’s Health Check Platform was designed to address.  

Another positive activity the FCA outlined was its intention to strengthen professional body supervision by focusing efforts in raising standards in key areas of weakness and taking further action where issues have not been addressed within a reasonable time frame.  One of the common issues that regulated businesses and supervising bodies face is to ensure there is an effective ML/TF risk assessment process in place to identify, assess, mitigate and manage financial crime risks and RegTech’s like Arctic Intelligence have developed purpose built platforms to raise the bar on financial crime risk management and can play a role in supporting the achievement of the FCA’s stated objective.

Read more on the 2020/2021 Business Plan via the Financial Conduct Authority website.

Subscribe to our newsletter for AML/CTF news and insights from around the world.

For daily updates, click below to follow us on LinkedIn.