FCA areas of research interest: what the regulator wants to learn and where it might lead
In short: The FCA areas of research interest, published on 10 June 2026, set out the priority questions the regulator wants researchers to help answer across growth, wholesale markets, consumers and regulation. They are not rules or a consultation. They show where the FCA’s evidence base is thin, and where its thinking may move next.
Every so often a regulator stops writing rules and asks a harder question: what do we actually know about whether our rules work? That is the spirit of the document the Financial Conduct Authority published on 10 June 2026. Its areas of research interest are not a consultation and carry no deadline. They are a list of the questions the FCA’s economists most want answered, an unusually candid map of where the regulator thinks its own evidence runs out. For anyone trying to read the FCA’s direction of travel, that map repays a slower read than the working week usually allows.
What the FCA areas of research interest actually are
The FCA areas of research interest are a set of priority research questions, published by the FCA’s chief economist, Kate Collyer, and aligned to the FCA strategy for 2025 to 2030. They span four themes: growth, wholesale markets, helping consumers, and regulation, with financial crime running through all four rather than sitting in a box of its own. The document invites academics, data scientists, behavioural scientists, technologists and policy analysts to bring fresh data and methods to bear, and offers collaboration through workshops, shared data and joint research.
Two features set the document apart from the usual run of FCA publications. First, it commits the regulator to nothing. There is no proposed rule, no cost-benefit analysis, no response form. Second, it is openly tentative. The FCA says it already understands much of the territory, and that the questions deliberately target the difficult problems where the analysis remains open. It sits alongside similar papers from HM Treasury, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Bank of England, part of a wider attempt across the official sector to align research effort. Read on its own terms, it is less a plan than a confession of where the regulator’s knowledge gives out.
The organising idea: can a regulator prove its rules help growth?
The thread that ties the document together is the FCA’s secondary objective. Since the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, the FCA must facilitate the international competitiveness and the medium to long-term growth of the UK economy, a duty now written into section 1EB of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. That objective changed the analytical task. A conduct regulator built to protect consumers and guard market integrity now has to weigh those aims against growth, and to do that honestly it needs to know something that is genuinely hard to measure: the effect of its own rules on investment, innovation and productivity.
The FCA’s Growth Gap literature review, published in 2024, was the first attempt to survey that evidence. Its candid finding was that the evidence is thin and often contested. The areas of research interest are the follow-on: a request for help filling the gap. The questions on the cost of regulation, on overcompliance or gold-plating, and on the benefits of regulation that firms feel but rarely quantify, all circle the same problem. Economists have argued about regulation’s real incidence for half a century, since George Stigler’s 1971 theory of economic regulation warned that rules can end up serving the regulated rather than the public. The harder modern difficulty is the counterfactual. The benefit of a rule is the harm it prevented, and a harm that never happened cannot be counted. The strategy’s language of rebalancing risk is the policy expression of the same point: the cost of caution, the investment never made and the product never launched, is real even though it appears in no enforcement statistic. The FCA work programme for 2026 already puts growth at the centre of its delivery; the research agenda is the attempt to build the evidence that growth-weighing decisions will need.
Reading the four themes
Each theme pairs a practical regulatory worry with a body of academic theory the FCA wants to draw on. The growth theme asks what explains the decline in financial-services productivity since the global financial crisis, how innovation can even be measured, and how the UK compares with rival financial centres. Underneath sits growth economics and an awkward measurement problem, because the output of financial services is notoriously hard to define, let alone count.
Wholesale markets are the most technical territory. Market microstructure theory underlies the FCA’s questions on the decline of the central limit order book in UK equities, the role of electronic liquidity providers and the effect of closing auctions, with the practical problem of detecting manipulation as trading automates running alongside. The consumer questions draw on behavioural economics, a field the FCA helped bring into conduct regulation more than a decade ago, and the harder new question is whether AI-enabled personalised pricing converges on fair risk-based outcomes or quietly exploits the information gap between firm and customer. The regulation theme asks the FCA to weigh its own tools: the balance between authorisation, supervision and enforcement, and how AI, distributed ledger technology and open finance reshape what a regulator can see and do.
| Theme | What the FCA is asking | The theory underneath |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | Why financial-services productivity fell after the crisis; how to measure innovation and competitiveness | Growth economics and the measurement of financial output |
| Wholesale markets | Liquidity, price discovery, the decline of the order book, and detecting abuse as trading automates | Market microstructure theory |
| Helping consumers | How people make sequential financial decisions; whether AI pricing is fair or exploitative | Behavioural economics |
| Regulation | The cost and benefit of regulatory models; the perimeter; how AI and open finance change the toolkit | Regulatory and institutional economics |
Where this early-stage research might lead
None of these questions has an answer yet. The choice of questions still hints at where the FCA’s thinking may travel, so it is worth brainstorming the directions rather than pretending the destinations are fixed.
Payments competition is the oldest question the document reopens. The consumer theme returns to the Cruickshank review of 2000, asking what has and has not changed in payments competition and innovation since Don Cruickshank reported to the Chancellor. (Cruickshank was Director General of Telecommunications at Oftel during my own time there, so the path from telecoms regulation to payments is not entirely untrodden!) That the FCA is asking this now, as it absorbs the Payment Systems Regulator and delivers the National Payments Vision, suggests the account-to-account, open finance and variable recurring payments agenda will be judged against a competition yardstick that is 25 years old and still not met. The same competition instinct shows up in the FCA’s growing use of its concurrent competition powers.
Artificial intelligence recurs in every theme: in personalised pricing, in market-abuse detection, in the resilience of automated trading, and in the FCA’s own use of generative tools. The recurring open question, whether algorithmic pricing reaches fair risk-based outcomes or exploits what the firm knows and the customer does not, is a data-governance question as much as a pricing one, and it falls within the UK’s sector-led approach to AI regulation and the FCA’s own work on AI in financial services.
The regulation theme, read alongside the strategy’s call to rebalance risk, could mark the evidence-gathering stage of a lighter-touch turn. If the FCA can show that a rule’s costs exceed its benefits, the secondary objective gives it a reason to pare back. The danger in that project is a measurement trap. Goodhart’s law holds that a measure pressed into service as a target stops measuring well, and the benefits of conduct regulation, trust and the willingness of people to take part in markets at all, are the hardest things to put a number on and the easiest to undercount. Where the regulatory perimeter should fall is one of the FCA’s own open questions, and it is the kind that takes firms into matters of regulatory perimeter and market entry. The most striking feature of the document is its candour. A regulator that publishes its open questions is inviting challenge to its own assumptions, which is both rare and welcome.
Viewpoint
I read this document less as a research wish-list and more as a statement about how the FCA wants to be judged. The secondary growth objective put the regulator in an analytically uncomfortable position, asked to weigh growth against protection without a reliable way to measure either side of the scale. The areas of research interest are an admission that the scale does not yet exist, and an invitation to help build it. In my experience advising payments and data firms, the questions that matter most to clients are precisely the ones the FCA flags as open: where the regulatory perimeter falls, what proportionate supervision looks like in practice, and whether new payment rails will be allowed to compete on equal terms. The document changes no obligation and binds no one. It still shows which way the regulator is leaning, and which arguments it is now willing to hear. For firms with evidence to offer, that is reason enough to read it closely, and perhaps to answer it.
Frequently asked questions
What are the FCA areas of research interest?
They are a set of priority research questions the FCA published on 10 June 2026, setting out where the regulator most wants fresh data, methods and evidence. The questions are grouped under four themes: growth, wholesale markets, helping consumers, and regulation, with financial crime running across all four. They are aligned to the FCA strategy for 2025 to 2030.
Is the document a consultation that firms must answer?
No. The areas of research interest are not a consultation. There is no deadline, no proposed rule and no obligation on any firm. The document is an open invitation to researchers and others to collaborate with the FCA on questions where its evidence base is thin. It carries no legal effect of its own.
What is the FCA’s secondary growth objective?
The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 gave the FCA a secondary objective, now in section 1EB of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, to facilitate the international competitiveness of the UK economy and its growth in the medium to long term. It is secondary to the FCA’s objectives on consumer protection, market integrity and competition, and frames much of the research agenda.
What does the document signal for payments firms?
It signals continued FCA attention to competition in payments. The consumer theme reopens the Cruickshank review of 2000, asking what has and has not changed since, and the questions on account-to-account payments, open finance and commercial cards suggest the regulator will judge the National Payments Vision against a long-standing competition test. The document is reflective rather than directive, so it changes no obligation.
How Bratby Law can help
Bratby Law advises payments, telecoms and data firms on FCA and PSR regulation, the regulatory perimeter and market entry. If you are weighing how the FCA’s direction of travel affects your business, contact Rob Bratby at Bratby Law.
