FCA Cuts £108M in Reporting Costs but Keeps CFDs in Scope

The Financial Conduct Authority has finalised rules cutting the annual cost of UK transaction reporting by £108 million, taking the industry's yearly bill from £493 million to roughly £385 million. Confirmed on 3 August 2026 in policy statement PS26/15, these are the deepest cuts since the UK onshored the MiFID regime after Brexit.

Contracts for difference and spread bets, however, are not part of the relief. The FCA has kept both firmly within the reporting net, citing their leveraged nature and vulnerability to market abuse.

What Changes

The reforms take effect on 3 April 2028. Reporting fields drop from 65 to 52. Foreign exchange derivatives are removed from scope, reducing the cost for more than 400 UK firms. Reporting obligations disappear for around 7 million instruments tradeable only on EU venues, worth about £32 million a year. The window for correcting historical errors is cut from five years to three, expected to reduce resubmitted reports by a third.

The FCA estimates 750 investment firms and 34 trading venues are affected. One-off implementation costs are pegged at £148.8 million against £942.8 million in benefits over ten years. A flexible supervisory approach applies from 3 August 2026, with draft schema and validation rules due in October.

Why CFDs Stay

The FCA wrote that leveraged products are “highly susceptible to market abuse” and its oversight relies on proactive surveillance. It pointed to June 2025 convictions of two individuals for insider dealing and money laundering who used CFDs to profit from share price falls, detected through transaction reports. In January 2025, the regulator fined Infinox Capital £99,200 over 46,053 unreported transactions, its first UK MiFIR enforcement action, and later contacted more than 130 firms over suspected reporting errors.

Simplification and Its Trade-Offs

Removing FX derivatives means less visibility over firms reporting under UK MiFIR but not UK EMIR, including 95 UK branches of third-country firms. The FCA is making its Financial Instruments Reference Data System, FCA FIRDS, the definitive source for determining reportability.

In April 2026, the FCA and Bank of England set up a joint taskforce on transaction and post-trade reporting, drawing more than 30 participants from major banks, asset managers and exchanges at its July inaugural meeting. The taskforce aims to align requirements across UK MiFIR, UK EMIR and UK SFTR.

Maria Fritzsche, senior policy adviser at PIMFA, welcomed the package. Therese Chambers, the FCA's Joint Executive Director of Enforcement and Market Oversight, said: “Transaction reports are the backbone of our market oversight work.”

What Retail Traders Should Know

The FCA's decision to keep CFDs and spread bets in scope underscores heightened regulatory attention on these products. The regulator's casework shows transaction reports used to detect and prosecute market abuse involving leveraged instruments. Every CFD trade leaves a regulatory footprint.