FCA financial promotions data: 2024 figures and the trend since 2021

The FCA's latest figures are for 2024

The FCA's most recent financial promotions data covers 1 January to 31 December 2024 and was published on 7 February 2025 (Financial promotions data 2024). Its headline: “Following our interventions, for authorised firms we had 19,766 promotions amended/withdrawn. This is an increase of 97.5%, compared to 10,008 in 2023.”

promotions amended or withdrawn by authorised firms after FCA intervention

19,766

of them after FCA engagement with 46 authorised claims management companies

9,197

alerts about unauthorised firms and individuals, down 2% on 2023

2,240

firms that agreed voluntary requirements restricting their promotions

18

The FCA's press release put it as “Nearly 20,000 financial promotions were withdrawn or amended in 2024 following intervention from the FCA”, “nearly double the amount in 2023” (FCA, 7 February 2025). Each is a promotion that an authorised firm changed or withdrew after the FCA stepped in.

Has the FCA published its 2025 data?

Not as of 24 October 2026. The FCA published an edition for every quarter from the first quarter of 2021 to the last quarter of 2024, and an annual edition each February from 2022 to 2025. Its index of editions ends with the 2024 annual and fourth-quarter editions, both published on 7 February 2025 (Previous financial promotions data). No edition covering any part of 2025 has appeared.

The one 2025 figure from the series so far is in the FCA's annual report for 2025/26, published on 9 July 2026 (Annual report and accounts 2025/26, page 37):

“We issued 2,329 warnings about unauthorised or potential scam firms and individuals in 2025, compared with 2,240 alerts in 2024.”

The report gives no 2025 figure for promotions amended or withdrawn. It says the FCA “took down more than 190 scam websites breaching FSMA” in 2025/26 (page 36). In June 2026, the FCA had 170 misleading car finance claims adverts removed or amended by claims management companies, bringing the total since January 2024 to 1,200 (FCA, 16 July 2026). The FCA's other figures since February 2025, on the 2024 sector split, finfluencers and approvers, are in the sections below.

What the figures count, and what they do not

The first edition describes the process behind the main figure: “Where we conclude that an advert is in breach of our rules, we ask the firm which has communicated or approved it to withdraw the advert, or change it so that it complies with our requirements” (2021 Q1 edition).

The 2024 edition carries two caveats:

“The figures reported within this data are accurate at the time of publication. However, they can be subject to change depending on any ongoing work with a firm.”

“The amend and/or withdraw outcome figure is based on cases closed during this period and will be determined by the number of promotions across various platforms.”

The figures do change between editions. The 2021 edition gave 564 promotions amended or withdrawn in 2021; the 2022 and 2023 editions give 573. The 2023 edition gave 2,285 alerts for 2023; the 2024 edition gives 2,286. This page uses the latest figure the FCA has published for each year.

Promotions amended or withdrawn, year by year

Year	Change reported by the FCA	Promotions amended or withdrawn
2020	–	207
2021	–	573
2022	Up 1398%	8,582
2023	Up 16.6%	10,008
2024	Up 97.5%	19,766

The series started small. In the earliest edition, covering the first quarter of 2021, “38 cases resulted in 105 promotions being amended or withdrawn through our interaction with authorised firms.”

The formal tools the FCA reported using on authorised firms' promotions, each restricting a firm's ability to communicate or approve them:

Sources: FCA financial promotions data 2021 to 2024; the 2023 and 2024 banning-power figures are from the quarterly editions for those years. A section 137S direction can require a firm “to withdraw the communication or approval”.

What the FCA says drove the numbers, and what comes next

2022. In May 2022 the FCA sent a Dear CEO letter “warning c28,000 lenders and brokers to stop using misleading terms in their advertising or face regulatory action”. It then wrote: “Our intervention in this sector has resulted in 7,191 promotions being amended or withdrawn; which is one of the contributing factors to the significant increase in our amend and withdraw outcomes for 2022” (2022 edition). Sarah Pritchard, its Executive Director, Markets, said: “By drawing on better technology, we're finding poor quality or misleading ads quicker” (FCA, 3 February 2023).

2023. The FCA proactively reviewed promotions by debt advice and debt packager firms, funeral plan providers, later life lenders, enterprise investment scheme providers, crypto firms, credit builder firms and firms with repeated non-compliance. “This proactive work resulted in 1401 (14% of the 10,008) promotions being amended or withdrawn during 2023” (2023 edition).

2024. “In 2024, our engagement with 46 authorised CMCs resulted in 9,197 financial promotions being amended/withdrawn (46% of the 19,766 total).” The FCA said some of the most common breaches involved claims management companies offering their services for housing disrepair or motor finance claims. Proactive reviews, including 411 social media promotions across 21 firms, led to “1,633 (8% of the 19,766)”, and cases with 4 buy now pay later firms led to 856 (2024 edition).

Its view of 2024 as a whole: “We are still concerned about the levels of compliance with the financial promotions' rules and will keep focusing on this area to reduce consumer harm.” What it has said comes next:

• Claims management: “In 2025 we will continue to monitor this sector closely and take action where appropriate” (2024 edition).
• Social media: “We want to see platforms take stronger action to proactively identify and stop illegal promotions being pushed on consumers” (2024 edition).
• Approvers: “The approval process being conducted under the section 21 gateway is not just a formality” (2024 edition).
• The rules: from 29 April to 17 June 2026 it consulted “on proposed changes to simplify our financial promotions rules in CONC 3” for consumer credit (CP26/15). On 16 October 2026 it said: “We will review our financial promotion rules for high-risk investments and if these rules treat products with similar risks in a consistent way” (FS26/3).

2024 quarter by quarter

Quarter	Promotions reviewed	Authorised firms	Alerts	Amended or withdrawn
Q1, published 26 April 2024	722	35	597	2,211
Q2, published 7 August 2024	943	39	528	3,273
Q3, published 25 October 2024	466	53	552	10,593
Q4, published 7 February 2025	1,358	78	584	3,697

The FCA's own monitoring found 61%, 69%, 36% and 72% of the promotions it reviewed in the four quarters. Reports about potential unauthorised business fell each quarter: 5,722, 5,544, 5,213 and 4,302. The most common breaches, the FCA said, involved claims management companies, credit brokers and CFD providers, with debt advice firms added in the third quarter; in the fourth it named claims management companies and “s21 approvers for Crypto firms” (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4).

Which firms and products the 2024 figures came from

The annual edition does not split the 19,766 by product. An FCA response to a freedom of information request, published on 4 September 2025, does: it breaks the total down by each firm's primary FCA portfolio, or the main product type being advertised (FOI2025/00547).

FCA portfolio	Promotions amended or withdrawn
Claims management	9,197
Credit brokers	3,272
Personal and commercial lines insurance intermediaries	1,616
Wealth management	1,432
Debt advice firms	1,145
Digital assets	1,098
Retail finance providers	682
Contracts for differences (CFD) providers	351
Payments	291
Deferred payment credit	171
Alternatives	165

The rest of the FCA's table: advisers and intermediaries 88, price comparison websites 68, mortgage intermediaries 62, debt purchasers, debt collectors and debt administrators 35, wholesale brokers 24, peer-to-peer lending platforms 20, retail banks 10, multilateral and organised trading facilities 10, platforms 9, lifetime mortgage providers 8, asset management 3, investment crowdfunders 3, SIPP operators 3, mainstream consumer credit lenders 2 and high-cost lenders 1.

The same response shows where the formal tools fell. Claims management firms accounted for 12 of the 18 voluntary requirements in 2024; CFD providers, credit brokers, debt advice firms, digital assets firms, mortgage intermediaries and retail finance providers had one each. The two own-initiative requirements were on a credit broker and a firm in the advisers and intermediaries portfolio (Annex B).

The quarterly editions use broader sectors and count cases rather than promotions. In each quarter of 2024, retail investments and retail lending made up most of the FCA's interventions with authorised firms: 85%, 89%, 87% and 89%.

Alerts and takedowns: the figures on unauthorised firms

Alerts warn the public, in the FCA's words, “when they may be dealing with an unauthorised, scam or clone firm” (2024 edition). In each quarter of 2024, 11% or 12% of alerts concerned clone scams, which use the details of authorised firms to look genuine.

Year	Change reported by the FCA	Alerts about unauthorised firms and individuals
2020	–	1,189
2021	Up 18%	1,410
2022	Up 34%	1,882
2023	Up 21%	2,286
2024	Down 2%	2,240
2025	–	2,329

The FCA received 34,244 reports about potential unauthorised business in 2021, 25,861 in 2022 and 24,865 in 2023 (2021 edition and the two that followed). It also reported how many websites it screened:

Sources: FCA financial promotions data 2022, 2023 and 2024. The FCA asks platforms to remove content rather than ordering it: “while we have no powers to require sites to be taken down, we continue to request that the platform hosting the harmful content removes it” (2023 edition).

For cryptoassets, between 8 October 2023, when the promotions regime took effect, and 31 December 2023, the FCA issued 450 consumer alerts against firms illegally promoting cryptoassets (2023 edition). Over the regime's first year it issued 1,702 consumer alerts about illegal crypto promotions, and its action led to “the take down of over 900 scam crypto websites and the removal of 56 apps from UK apps stores” (2024 Q3 edition). The rules themselves are in crypto promotion rules in the UK.

Finfluencer figures

The 2024 edition named two platforms: “some platforms, like X and Discord, have refused to remove unlawful content except in exceptional circumstances.” What makes a post illegal is covered in finfluencer rules in the UK.

Section 21 approver gateway figures

Since 7 February 2024, an authorised firm has needed the FCA's permission to approve promotions for unauthorised persons outside its group (section 21 approval and the gateway; FSMA section 21). The data editions give no figures on applications. FCA responses to freedom of information requests do:

firms applied for approver permission in the window from 6 November 2023 to 6 February 2024

107

of those applications approved; 30 withdrawn, 1 rejected and 1 still being assessed

75

applications made since 7 February 2024 approved

17 of 27

approver permissions cancelled since 7 February 2024

0

An earlier response, published on 2 April 2025, said: “Seventy-seven firms have received the approver permissions taking an average of 292 days to approve” (FOI12145).

The 2024 edition notes that approvers submit returns every six months, and gives one good practice example: “a Section 21 approver had introduced software to monitor approved financial promotions on their clients' websites.”

Breaches the FCA described in its 2024 editions

The case examples in the four 2024 quarterly editions give a working list of what went wrong:

The rules behind items 4 and 6 are in consumer credit and BNPL promotion rules and CFD risk warning wording.

How we keep this page current

We update this page when the FCA publishes new financial promotions data. The latest editions used here are Financial promotions data 2024 and Financial promotions quarterly data 2024 Q4, both published by the FCA on 7 February 2025. We last checked the FCA's index of editions on 24 October 2026. Figures published outside the series are dated where they appear.

Connor reads a promotion (an image, video, PDF, web page or social post) and works out which rules apply from the firm's home regulator, the markets it targets and the products it promotes. Each finding quotes the words it is about, cites the rule and links to the regulator's text where one is published; a person at the firm makes the decision, and Connor keeps the record.