The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has charged 21 people with financial crimes since April 2023, the highest number of prosecutions it has made in a single year, the regulator has revealed.

In the financial year ending in April 2024, the FCA also secured nine freezing orders, six more than in 2022, and restrained £21.1m in assets of individuals under investigation.

This increase in enforcement action shows that the financial regulator is “using [its] powers more assertively than ever,” according to FCA Executive Director Sarah Pritchard, who also cited the £15m fine imposed on PwC for failing to alert the FCA to suspected fraudulent activity as evidence of its robust approach to financial crime.

In a speech made at London’s Financial Crime Summit on 5 September 2024, Pritchard stressed the importance of the FCA’s “targeted and outcomes-focused approach” for the regulator to “bear down on financial crime in an effective and proportionate way”.

Pritchard used the timing of the summit to draw on similarities between financial crime and the Great Fire of London, which took place at the start of September 1666 when a fire broke out at a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane.

“Think of financial crime as that spark in the bakery,” urged Pritchard. “Sure, it may start small – just a minor fraud or a simple scam.

“But if left unchecked, if not targeted and contained, it can grow into something much larger and sweep through the economy, damaging businesses, damaging livelihoods and damaging trust in our financial systems.”

In her speech, Pritchard, who is responsible for the delivery of the FCA’s statutory market integrity objective and co-leads the combined Supervision, Policy and Competition (SPC) division, emphasised the wide-ranging consequences of abuse of the UK’s financial system.

“Financial crime costs every one of us here today – consumers and firms alike,” she said.

“It violates the financial systems we rely on to live our everyday lives and uses them against us. It fuels all manner of harmful activities from terrorist financing to money laundering, to fraud. And it damages the integrity of our markets, undermining our international competitiveness.”

The FCA’s director used her speech to reinforce that fighting financial crime remains a major commitment of the FCA’s three-year strategy.

Pritchard emphasised her belief that innovation and partnership are key to prevent the threats posed by abuse of the country’s financial services sector.

“I do not want us to be constantly hosing down fires where they arise,” said Pritchard, “I want us to also be making strategic interventions to stop them breaking out in the first place.

“That means working with partners across the whole UK system, through the UK’s public and private partnerships and the economic crime plan, at the same time as driving a more integrated and targeted approach to tackling financial crime across the FCA.”

Read the full transcript of the speech here.

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