FCA

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulates approximately 50,000 financial services firms in the UK — including banks, insurance companies, investment firms, payment institutions, and increasingly, fintech companies. FCA authorization is required before a firm can carry out regulated financial activities. The FCA's supervisory approach has evolved significantly: technology systems, data practices, and operational resilience are now core areas of FCA examination, not ancillary concerns.

The FCA's Consumer Duty (effective July 2023) is the most significant regulatory change in a generation. It requires firms to demonstrate that they are delivering good outcomes for retail customers across four areas: products and services, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support. For technology systems, Consumer Duty means that every customer-facing feature, every pricing algorithm, every communication, and every support workflow must be designed with demonstrable consumer outcome evidence — not just compliance documentation. This is an engineering requirement, not a legal one.

FCA operational resilience rules require firms to identify their important business services, map the systems and processes that deliver them, set impact tolerances (the maximum disruption level tolerable), and demonstrate through testing that they can remain within tolerances. This creates specific engineering requirements: firms must know exactly what infrastructure each important business service depends on, how long it can survive failures, and how it will be recovered. Annual resilience testing is mandatory.

We build FCA-compliant systems for UK financial services firms — implementing Consumer Duty evidence generation into customer-facing systems, designing operational resilience architecture that satisfies impact tolerance requirements, and building the monitoring and testing infrastructure that demonstrates compliance to FCA supervisors. Our teams understand the FCA examination process and build systems that survive it.

Compliance-Native Architecture Guide

Design principles and a structured checklist for building software that is compliant by default — not compliant by retrofit. Covers data architecture, access controls, audit trails, and vendor due diligence.