FCA says protecting market integrity now means moving faster and judging by outcomes

Victoria Shinder26 October 2026, 15:061 min read

The UK Financial Conduct Authority used a speech titled "Market integrity in a digital age" to set out how it intends to protect market integrity as technology accelerates. The argument is that the regulator must move faster and focus on outcomes rather than rules, and that stronger partnerships between regulators, industry and government are essential. The FCA placed tokenisation and AI adoption among the areas where UK firms are leading, and framed market integrity — the confidence that investors and firms need in markets, including their ability to withstand and recover from shocks — as one of its primary statutory objectives. The speaker's own phrase was that the market may be "getting past peak rule making" but is "nowhere near peak reform."

What it means

"Outcomes over rules" is the line worth weighing, because it cuts both ways. For firms building tokenised instruments or deploying AI in trading and surveillance, an outcomes-focused regulator is more workable than one issuing prescriptive rules for technology that changes under them — it leaves room to engineer toward a standard rather than to a checklist. The cost is predictability: an outcome you are judged against after the fact is harder to design to than a rule you can read in advance, and "we will know integrity when we see it" is uncomfortable for anyone making a large upfront investment. The signal to take from the speech is directional, not operational. It tells you where the FCA's attention is going — tokenisation, AI, market resilience — and that it prefers partnership to prescription, which is useful for deciding what to raise with the regulator early rather than discover in enforcement later.