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The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority just added five more companies to its Scale-up Unit — ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle, and Zilch. All five are solely regulated by the FCA, making them the first firms in that category to join the initiative.
The five span a pretty wide slice of financial services. Modulr sits in payments. ClearScore handles credit information. Zilch operates in consumer finance. Teya works across payments too. Urban Jungle is insurtech. Different sectors, same basic problem: growing fast enough that regulatory navigation becomes genuinely hard, and getting tripped up at that stage can cost a company real momentum. The Scale-up Unit is the FCA’s answer to that — a dedicated function that gives high-growth firms tailored regulatory support, not just generic guidance. It’s meant to help them build new products, respond to policy shifts, and manage the kind of rapid expansion that can quietly create compliance blind spots if nobody’s watching closely.
Worth noting: ClearScore, Modulr, and Zilch all sit on the Unicorn Council for UK FinTech, a coalition set up by Innovate Finance that brings together UK-based fintech unicorn founders and CEOs. The goal there is accelerating sector growth broadly, so there’s some overlap between that lobbying and advocacy function and what the FCA is trying to do on the regulatory side.
What the Pilot Found
Before this expansion, the FCA ran an Early and High Growth Oversight pilot between July 2025 and March 2026. Fifteen firms took part, spread across asset and wealth management and payments. The point was to catch rapidly growing firms earlier — before problems compound — and get support in front of them while there’s still time to course-correct.
The insights from that pilot came out August 10, 2026. The headline finding isn’t shocking, but it’s important: early investment in governance and risk management matters. A lot. Firms that build those frameworks as they grow, rather than bolting them on later, handle the pressures of scaling more sustainably. It sounds obvious. But plenty of fast-growing companies prioritize product and revenue first, then scramble to retrofit compliance infrastructure when regulators come knocking. The pilot data basically said: don’t do that.
Those insights are now being fed directly into how the Scale-up Unit operates. So the firms joining now — ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle, Zilch — are getting support shaped by what the FCA learned from 15 earlier companies navigating similar terrain.
How the Unit Fits Into the FCA’s Broader Support Stack
The Scale-up Unit doesn’t exist in isolation. It slots into a wider set of FCA programs designed to move firms along a structured path from early-stage to full scale. The Pre-Application Support Service, known as PASS, covers companies in the early phases of their regulatory journey. Innovation Pathways handles firms developing genuinely novel products that need bespoke regulatory thinking. Early and High Growth Oversight — the function that ran the pilot — catches companies mid-flight, when growth is accelerating but the regulatory muscle hasn’t caught up yet.
The Scale-up Unit sits at the top of that stack, basically. It’s for firms that have already cleared the early hurdles and are now moving fast enough that standard regulatory engagement isn’t really sufficient. The FCA says it’s been supporting over 1,000 innovative and growing firms since launching its innovation services, so the infrastructure here isn’t new — it’s just getting more targeted.
Back in February, the FCA announced the first cohort of the Scale-up Unit: six firms that are co-regulated by both the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority. The five new additions — the ones announced now — are different in one specific way. They’re solely FCA-regulated. That’s a meaningful distinction, and it means the unit is widening its scope beyond the dual-regulated space.
No date yet on when applications open for the next cohort. The FCA said it plans to open that process soon. No details beyond that.
The Early and High Growth Oversight function will keep running alongside the Scale-up Unit. Its job is proactive engagement — finding firms that are growing quickly, including newly authorized ones and companies going through significant operational change, and getting in front of them before growth creates regulatory gaps. It’s a different entry point than the Scale-up Unit, but they’re feeding the same general pipeline.
For the UK fintech sector broadly, the FCA’s push here is partly about competitiveness. The argument is that if high-growth firms can navigate regulation more efficiently — without unnecessary friction slowing product development or market expansion — the UK stays attractive as a place to build and scale a financial services business. Whether the Scale-up Unit actually moves that needle is harder to measure. But the FCA’s been pretty consistent about framing innovation support as central to its mandate, not peripheral to it.
The next cohort application window is coming. Timing unclear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which five firms joined the FCA Scale-up Unit in August 2026?
ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle, and Zilch joined the Scale-up Unit. All five are solely regulated by the FCA, making them the first firms in that category to participate.
What did the FCA’s Early and High Growth Oversight pilot find?
The pilot, which ran from July 2025 to March 2026 across 15 firms, found that early investment in governance and risk management is key to handling rapid growth sustainably. Findings were published August 10, 2026.
