The UK’s fintech regulator is building a formal on-ramp between startup and scale-up, and it just added five well-known names to prove the model works beyond a pilot. On August 10, the Financial Conduct Authority admitted ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle and Zilch to its Scale-up Unit, the first firms regulated solely by the FCA to join the programme, spanning payments, consumer finance, credit information and insurtech.
The Scale-up Unit gives fast-growing firms tailored regulatory support as they launch products, respond to policy changes and manage the strain of rapid growth, rather than leaving them to interpret the FCA Handbook alone at the moment they can least afford a misstep. Six dual-regulated firms, supervised jointly by the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority, formed the unit’s first cohort in February; applications from solo-regulated firms opened in May and closed June 22. “We want the UK to remain one of the best places in the world to start, grow and scale a financial services business,” said Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data information and innovation officer.
The original insight sits in what the FCA published alongside the new cohort: findings from a separate Early and High Growth Oversight pilot that ran from July 2025 to March 2026 across 15 firms in asset management, wealth management and payments. Its conclusion: firms investing early in governance and controls handled rapid growth better than those that backfilled compliance later, a direct answer to how much control infrastructure a scaling fintech needs before its next funding round. That pattern echoes a broader regulatory shift, from the UK and US splitting bank-charter routes into distinct tracks to regulators like Singapore’s MAS building supervisory structures around AI-era risk. Since launching its innovation services, the FCA has now supported more than 1,000 growing firms.
Source: Financial Conduct Authority
