Regulations
By Bruce Buterin
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What the Numbers Actually Say. The FCA's Financial Lives survey from 2024 put some hard numbers on the problem. Around 0.
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Nine Banks, Individual Plans, One Deadline. Barclays UK, HSBC UK, and NatWest Group are among the nine banks that have agreed to develop…
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The Bigger Picture on Financial Inclusion. Basic bank accounts have a legal mandate behind them.
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Nine of the UK's biggest banks are on notice. The Financial Conduct Authority wrapped up a mystery shopping exercise that found roughly a third of interactions around basic bank…
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The FCA tested 298 interactions across branches and phone lines. Of those, 20% came back rated poor and another 14% rated very poor.
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The FCA's Financial Lives survey from 2024 put some hard numbers on the problem. Around 0.9 million UK adults remain completely unbanked. Out of the 1.
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The core failure the FCA kept running into was simple: banks weren't offering basic accounts to people who qualified for them.
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See also: FCAs Mills Review Puts 11 Million UK Adults at the Heart of AI Finance Shift
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Emad Aladhal, the FCA's director of retail banking, was careful not to say everything is fine.
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Peter Tyler, director of personal banking at UK Finance, framed basic bank accounts as a stepping stone toward financial independence.
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Basic bank accounts have a legal mandate behind them. Banks covered by the rules are required to offer them.
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The gap between the 97%-plus of adults with current accounts and the roughly 0.9 million still unbanked might sound small. But for the people in that gap, it's not.
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More context: UK Watchdog Chief Warns Agentic AI Poses Systemic Risks to Global Finance
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Banks will now move forward with their individual plans. The FCA will monitor compliance and check whether the changes actually produce better outcomes, not just better paperwork.
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Aladhal's message wasn't subtle. Banks made commitments. The FCA is holding them to those commitments. And the 0.
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