FCA AI Strategy
The Financial Conduct Authority's AI strategy is the UK financial regulator's published approach to AI supervision, emphasising existing rules over new AI-specific legislation.
What is FCA AI Strategy?
The FCA's strategy treats AI as another technology that must comply with existing principles: senior management responsibility under the SMCR, consumer duty, operational resilience, market conduct, and data protection. The FCA runs a sandbox, a digital sandbox, and AI-specific cross-regulator initiatives with the Bank of England and PRA. The UK approach is principles-led rather than the EU's prescriptive horizontal regulation.
How does FCA AI Strategy apply to enterprise AI?
AI vendors selling into UK financial services should map controls to the consumer duty and operational resilience frameworks rather than expecting an FCA equivalent of the EU AI Act.
Related terms
- DORA - The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is an EU regulation that sets uniform requirements for the digital operational resilience of financial entities, including their use of AI and ICT third-party service providers.
- EU AI Act - The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the European Union's horizontal regulation for AI, classifying systems by risk and imposing obligations on providers, deployers, importers, and distributors.
- AI Risk Management - AI risk management is the discipline of identifying, assessing, mitigating, and monitoring the harms an AI system can cause across its lifecycle.
- Explainable AI (XAI) - Explainable AI (XAI) is the set of techniques that make an AI system's outputs and behaviour understandable to humans, supporting trust, debugging, and regulatory compliance.
External references
Need help applying FCA AI Strategy to your enterprise? Submit a short brief and we reply within one business day.