Short Term Pain = Long Term Gain
Those of you who are fully acclimatised to life under the FCA will be familiar with one of the more onerous elements of their requirements; reporting. If you’re struggling with the volume and frequency of the regulator’s reporting requirements, I’d encourage you to think of them in the same way as a visit to the dentist; fleetingly unpleasant but completely necessary…and a lot more painful in the long-run if you try to avoid it!
The returns schedule for reporting is based on the regulated activities conducted by a firm and how that firm is categorised. The submission frequency is as follows:
- Credit revenue £5M or less – annually
- Credit revenue more than £5M – bi-annually
- Limited permission – annually
- Product sales data (HCC/HCSTC) –quarterly
- Credit broking (trading names / sites) – quarterly
More information on the key reporting obligations can be found on the FCA’s site in SUP 16.12: Integrated Regulatory Reporting, and I’d urge you to read that in full.
The person at your firm who is registered as the ‘primary user’ by the FCA will receive reminder emails before every report submission is due – a good reason to ensure that the regulator has all your up to date contact information. As I mentioned above, it may be a pain fulfilling your reporting requirements at the time but it is not optional; non-submission or late submission means that you would be liable for a £250 administration fee and repeated non-submission could lead to enforcement action from the regulator and, ultimately, the loss of authorisation.
On the positive side, the requirement to report on a wide range of business information means that you will have all that data at your fingertips for your own purposes too, and it could be a great help in reviewing and improving your internal processes and practices.
In next week’s article I’ll be looking at the reports themselves and what information is required for each section but, until then, if you have any questions on the information in this article, or any other area of regulation or compliance support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Consumer Credit Centre team on 01484 443424. We help firms manage their responsibilities under the FCA and our Ongoing Compliance Service is available to AOBP members at a discounted rate of just £40+VAT per month.
David Golder
Managing Director
Consumer Credit Centre
SimplyBiz Group