UK Regulators Start Treating Reporting Costs as a Metric to Manage, as the FCA Proposes Its Biggest Transaction-Reporting Overhaul in Years

Regulators are starting to treat compliance cost itself as a metric to manage, not just a byproduct of oversight. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has proposed the first major overhaul of transaction reporting under UK MiFIR since the rules were written, projecting it will cut the industry’s reporting bill by more than a fifth.

Under consultation paper CP25/32, the FCA wants to remove foreign exchange derivatives from reporting scope for more than 400 firms, strip out reporting obligations for roughly 6 million financial instruments that trade only on EU venues, and shorten the default error-correction window from five years to three, a change expected to cut resubmitted reports by about a third. The FCA puts the industry’s current annual reporting cost at 493 million pounds and projects the reforms would bring it down to 385 million pounds, a net saving of 108 million pounds a year. The regulator processes more than 7 billion MiFID transaction reports annually. “Reducing costs while improving the data quality we receive is a no-brainer,” said Therese Chambers, the FCA’s joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight.

For compliance leaders, the more consequential detail is the mandate beyond this consultation: the FCA says it is now coordinating with HM Treasury and the Bank of England on a shared long-term approach spanning MiFIR, EMIR, and SFTR, rather than reforming each reporting regime in isolation. That signals firms should stop treating reporting-tech investment as regime-specific and start building for a converged reporting architecture, the same instinct behind the Federal Reserve’s own push to modernize capital rules frozen since the 1990s. A policy statement is due in the second half of 2026, with an implementation window of roughly 18 months once finalized.

Source: FCA