The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has written to the Treasury Select Committee to say it will not take forward its proposal to shift from an exceptional circumstances test to a public interest test for announcing investigations into regulated firms – the so-called ‘name and shame’ plan.
It said this was due to ‘a lack of consensus’.
“We have published a letter to the Treasury Select Committee, setting out significant improvement in the pace of our investigations as well as next steps on our approach to transparency of enforcement investigations,” the regulator said in statement.
The FCA explained that following ‘extensive engagement’, there is support for reactively confirming investigations already in the public domain, public notifications which focus on the potentially unlawful activities of unregulated firms and regulated firms operating outside the regulatory perimeter; and publishing greater detail of issues under investigation on an anonymous basis.
See also: AJ Bell: Key events for advisers watch out for this month
The watchdog will take forward these proposals, and publish the final policy by the end of June.
It added it will continue to prioritise work to tackle non-financial misconduct is ‘taking further time to get this right’ and will set out next steps by the end of June.
See also: Advisers eyeing rising Business Relief demand as IHT squeeze nears
Nikhil Rathi, chief executive of the FCA, said: “We are speeding up our enforcement work. On our enforcement transparency proposals, we have always aimed to build a broad consensus.
“Considerable concerns remain about our proposal to change the way we publicise investigations into regulated firms, so we will stick to publicising in exceptional circumstances as we do today.
“We will implement changes which have commanded wider support and which we believe will help support our efforts to protect consumers from harm.”
See also: SJP aiming to ‘improve perception’ and become more attractive to advisers
