Skip to content
Sectors · Financial services

Financial services

Financial promotion is the most instrumented advertising regime on earth. The FCA reads websites at scale, risk warnings have prescribed wording and placement, and an unapproved promotion can be a criminal offence, not just a fine.

FCAPRAFOSICOSEC / FINRA (US)State regulators (US)ESMA & national authorities (EU)DFSA (DIFC)FSRA (ADGM)SAMA / CMA (KSA)
Financial services FCA, ICO, ASA

Sub-sectors, with their real law counts

Read live from the Attachment Matrix. Counts shown for United Kingdom / England; every cell opens the full stack in the Explorer.

Risk warnings, measured where they actually sit.

Promotions are checked for the required warning, its wording and its prominence relative to the claim it qualifies. Position, contrast and viewport presence are measured from the rendered page, not from the source.

What the Radar watches hardest here

FSMA s.21: every financial promotion needs approval by an authorised person; the indicator is a promotion with no approver named.
Crypto regime (PS23/6): prescribed risk warning, no incentives to invest, 24-hour cooling-off. The FCA issued 146 alerts on day one of the regime.
Fair, clear, not misleading (COBS 4): prominence tests matter, and a risk warning below the fold is a finding, not a technicality.
Claims management and finfluencer content: the FCA interviewed 20 finfluencers under caution in 2024.
Register validation: your FCA reference number is checked against the register, including permissions matching what the website sells.

A worked scenario

ILLUSTRATIVE

A UK IFA expanding into crypto commentary

Challenge. A new "digital assets" page carried performance language and no prescribed risk warning; the firm assumed commentary was not a promotion.

What the Radar did. The Radar attached the crypto promotions stack the day targeting evidence appeared, flagged the missing warning as T1 and the "commentary vs promotion" boundary as a T3 for compliance counsel.

Outcome. Page corrected within its 48-hour deadline, before the FCA’s website-scale monitoring (480,000 new sites assessed in a year) read it first.

ENFORCEMENT CLIMATE · CITED
19,766
promotions amended or withdrawn after FCA intervention in 2024, up 97.5% year on year
FCA PROMOTIONS DATA 2024
£180.1m
penalties collected by the FCA in 2024/25, up from £35.3m the year before
FCA ANNUAL REPORT 2025
1,516
firm authorisations cancelled in a year, triple the 2021 figure, driven by data-led supervision
FCA ANNUAL REPORT 2025

See your exact stack, then watch it.

Pick your sub-sector and jurisdiction in the Explorer for the verbatim law list, or start with the introductory audit and see the Radar's method on your own website.

Open the Explorer Request the audit

Watchlist items describe checks the Radar runs, not legal advice about your business. Applicability depends on confirmed facts and supported scope. Scenario is illustrative, not a client reference.