Sarah Pritchard has spoken on the importance of working together and sharing intelligence as a key part of tackling financial crime. She spoke of using a targeted approach to spot outliers and issues. She discussed how the FCA has become more rigorous at the authorisation gateway – saying that in the last financial year, 36% of firms applying for registration under the MLRs as “annex 1” firms (this would not include crypto firms) had had their applications rejected or had withdrawn them because they did not meet the right standards.
She moved on to discuss that over 10,000 potentially misleading ads were amended or withdrawn in 2023 as a result of FCA’s actions and then spoke about the FCA’s dedicated financial crime function which works proactively to spot threats – including a high turnover of MLROs in a firm, frequent changes to its registered name or significant changes to the services they provide once authorised. The FCA has been carrying out spot visits which have re
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