FCA Slashes Reporting Costs £108M but CFDs Stay Watched

The UK's FCA has finalised rules cutting annual transaction reporting costs by £108 million, from £493 million to roughly £385 million. Confirmed on 3 August 2026 in PS26/15, the changes mark a major post-Brexit deregulatory move, but the regulator has kept a hard line on leveraged retail products.

CFDs and spread bets remain in scope. The FCA stated these products are leveraged and “highly susceptible to market abuse,” and that its market integrity work depends on proactive surveillance. It pointed to June 2025 convictions of two individuals for insider dealing and money laundering who used CFDs to profit from share price falls, activity identified from transaction reports. The new rules take effect on 3 April 2028, with a flexible supervisory approach from 3 August 2026 for firms ready to align sooner.

Contents

01

What Leaves and What Stays

02

Costs and Enforcement

03

The FX Blind Spot and What Comes Next

What Leaves and What Stays

FX derivatives come out of scope, affecting more than 400 UK firms. Reporting obligations disappear for seven million instruments tradeable only on EU venues, saving roughly £32 million a year. Reporting fields fall from 65 to 52, and firms now correct errors going back three years instead of five, cutting resubmitted reports by one third. FCA FIRDS becomes the definitive source for determining reportability, with regulatory protection for firms that reasonably rely on it. The corporate actions exemption is also expanded.

Costs and Enforcement

The FCA estimated one-off implementation costs of £148.8 million, mostly IT work at investment firms, against £942.8 million in benefits over ten years. Gap analysis was costed at £40,000 for a large firm and £2,400 for a small one, covering 750 investment firms and 34 trading venues. The FCA receives more than seven billion MiFID transaction reports annually.

In January 2025, the FCA fined Infinox Capital £99,200 over 46,053 unreported transactions, its first UK MiFIR enforcement action, and later contacted more than 130 firms over suspected reporting errors. Therese Chambers, the FCA's Joint Executive Director of Enforcement and Market Oversight, said transaction reports underpin the regulator's market oversight work.

The FX Blind Spot and What Comes Next

Removing FX derivatives reduces visibility over firms reporting under UK MiFIR but not UK EMIR, including 95 UK branches of third-country firms. ESMA is reviewing its own regime, but if the EU does not streamline, firms running one system across both jurisdictions would have to split their reporting logic.

Maria Fritzsche of PIMFA welcomed the simplification, calling the corporate actions exemption expansion, FCA FIRDS as reportability reference point, and reduced back-reporting a more proportionate approach while supporting effective market oversight.

A joint FCA and Bank of England taskforce held its first meeting in July 2026 with more than 30 participants from major banks and asset managers, working to align UK MiFIR, UK EMIR and UK SFTR. Draft schema and validation rules are due in October 2026.