The FCA has set out its business plan for 2024/25, promising to continue to focus on preventing serious harm to consumers, setting higher standards and promoting competition.

Wealth manager and Financial Planning firm Saltus has appointed former Hiscox chief executive Bronek Masojada as chairman to support the firm’s growth agenda.

Fintech and adviser support services firm Fintel, owner of SimplyBiz and Defaqto, has reported a 0.3% rise in revenue to £56.6m for the year ending in December, compared to £56.4m in 2022.

Brooks Macdonald senior director Stewart Sanderson has been appointed chief executive of Irwin Mitchell’s Financial Planning business IM Asset Management Limited.

The FCA has provisionally fined Nailesh Teraiya, formerly sole controller and chief executive of Indigo Global Partners Limited (Indigo), £5.95m and has provisionally banned him from carrying out any regulated activity after finding him guilty of making fake trades.

Former Tees Wealth head of investment management Kieran Follis has teamed up with platform P1 Investment Services to launch boutique DFM investment management firm Magellan Research & Investment.

Convicted money launderer and ex-solicitor Dale Robert Walker, 64, has satisfied a confiscation order after a member of his family paid £33,500 outstanding from £716,719 he was ordered to repay due to his criminal activities relating to an investment scheme.

Strike action by members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union at The Pensions Regulator has been suspended and staff returned to work last Wednesday. 

The FCA is to conduct a review into what regulated firms are doing to understand and respond to the needs of customers in vulnerable circumstances.

A decade on from George Osborne’s ‘Pension Freedoms’ Budget bombshell announcement in 2014, the latest HMRC data showed that £70bn of retirement cash has since been accessed flexibly by British savers.