Earlier this month the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced in its Policy Statement 22/1 the simplification of its current structure for authorisation application fees. This will be effective from 24th January 2022.
The regulator reports that most of the application fees have not changed in 20 years since its predecessor, the FSA, introduced them. To date, there are more than 80 separate charges for FCA applications, which can be confusing, so fees have now been condensed into 10 new simple pricing categories.
The FCA states that the impact of the new fee structures would raise the contribution of applicants towards the cost of processing their applications from about a third to about two-thirds. Of the current 80 separate charges 49 charges have increased in cost, 23 have stayed the same and 11 have been reduced.
The newly published policy statement applies to all FCA fee-payers and to businesses considering applying for FCA authorisation or registration.
Further information regarding the pricing categories can be found here