FCA Annual Competition Report for 2018/2019
Regulatory Updates | 09/07/19
The FCA has published its annual competition performance report for 2018/19, setting out progress over the year to 31 March 2019 against its competition objective. The report is intended to complement the FCA’s wider annual report for the same period. The FCA published the finalised version of its FCA Mission: Approach to Competition in October 2018. The sections within the competition performance report are structured in the same way as the four-step decision-making framework the FCA uses in its Approach, with specific examples of its work over the year:
• identifying harm – the FCA outlines its work on fairness in pricing practices, including the publication on fair pricing in October 2018;
• diagnosing the cause of harm – the FCA summarises the diagnostic tools available to it, and sets out the key milestones over the year for a range of market studies and strategic reviews it conducted. The FCA expects to publish an interim report on its market study on general insurance pricing practices, with a final report at the end of 2019. The FCA also refers to its first formal CA98 enforcement decision in February 2019, which concluded that three asset managers had breached competition law;
• remedying harm – the FCA provides three examples of where it intervened to support consumer choice and where it intervened with supply side remedies to protect vulnerable consumers; and
• · measuring the FCA’s impact – the FCA explains how it evaluates the impact of its work, including through the ex-post evaluation framework launched in December 2018.
