Money Covered: The Week That Was – 28 November 2025

Welcome to The Week That Was, a round-up of key events in the financial services sector over the last seven days.

The fourth episode of Season 4 of our podcast, Money Covered – The Month That Was, where the team looks at Employment Practices Liability insurance and its relationship to Directors & Officers insurance, is now available.

To listen to this and all previous episodes, please click here.

Headline development

Autumn budget

In this year's Autumn budget, the Chancellor took the opportunity to make various changes to tax and pensions..

Some of the more notable changes to tax and pensions include:

Personal Tax

• For those under the age of 65, the £20,000 ISA limit being maintained but with a requirement that £8,000 of that must be reserved exclusively for investments. For those over 65 the ISA limit will remain the same.
• National Insurance and Income Tax thresholds to be frozen for a further 3 years from 2028.
• Basic and higher income tax rates on property, savings and dividend income will be increased by 2 percentage points to account for the lack of National Insurance on rental income.
• Starting in 2028, a 'High Value Council Surcharge' will be introduced alongside Council Tax. For properties worth more than £2m, there will be a £2,5000 charge, which will rise to £7,500 for properties worth more than £5m.

Corporation Tax

• The Chancellor, in her preamble, committed to widening eligibility enterprise incentives, and referred to re-engineering the enterprise investment and Venture Capital Trust Schemes.
• Companies that choose to list in the UK will be eligible for the UK listing relief which will exempt them for 3 years from UK Stamp Duty Tax.
• There will be a reduction to the relief for capital gains tax on business sales from 100% to 50%.
• The current rates for corporation tax and business expensing will be retained.
• The first year allowance will be increased to 40% for businesses in order to allow them to write off more of their investment and reduce main rate down allowances.
• There will be an introduction of targeted tax measures to support retail and leisure businesses including permanent lower business rates for over 750,000 retail, hospitality, and leisure properties. 

Pensions

• The basic and new state pension payments will go up by 4.8% from April 2026.
• The exemption from National Insurance for pension contributions under salary sacrifice schemes will be capped to £2,000 from 2029.
• The Chancellor has committed to transferring the investment reserve fund from the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme to its members.
• The Chancellor has committed to indexing for inflation on all pensions incurred before 1997 in the Pension Protection Fund and the Financial Assistance Scheme – introducing CPI-linked increases capped at 2.5% per year.
• Abolishment of access to Class 2 Voluntary National Insurance contributions and increasing the amount of time a person has to live in the UK prior to claiming a pension.
• People only in receipt of the basic or new state pension will have to pay small amounts of income tax if their earnings cross the tax-free threshold as determined by simple assessments from April 2027. 

To read the budget in full, please click here.

Pensions

Pensions Commission urged to consider climate change and sustainability as part of its ongoing sector review

Earlier this year, the governmentrevived the Pensions Commission (the Commission) to review and address issues associated with savings inadequacy in the UK pension system. The Pensions Commission's report is expected next spring. More recently, the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF) has raised concerns that the Pension Commission's current review does not adequately consider climate risk or the transition to net zero. 

UKSIF’s chief executive, James Alexander, has written to the Commission, urging it to integrate climate change considerations into its review, especially as the government seeks to tackle pension savings inadequacy for future retirees. Alexander points out that neither rising global temperatures nor the shift towards decarbonisation are explicitly mentioned in the Commission’s terms of reference, which could undermine the resilience of pension portfolios in the face of future climate-related challenges.

UKSIF argues that climate risk and sustainability are inseparable from the long-term security of pension schemes, given their exposure to both physical and transition risks as the UK moves towards 2050. The organisation recommends that, at a minimum, the Commission should highlight the importance of factoring climate change and net-zero objectives into any future pension reforms. 

To read more, please click here. 

FOS developments

FOS releases 2026/27 plans and budget consultation paper

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has launched a consultation on its 2026/27 Plans and Budget, focusing on continuous service improvement and ambitious targets for case resolution. This forms part of the FOS’s broader engagement on priorities and performance. The FOS publishes its final plans and budget before the end of each financial year, including a summary of stakeholder feedback. Its budget must be approved by the FCA, which also publishes details of its fees. 

Although case volumes are starting to fall following measures to ensure complaints are better evidenced, the FOS expects to receive 188,000 cases next year and aims to resolve 245,000, including 60,000 related to motor finance commission. Complaints about Buy Now Pay Later products are anticipated from mid-2026, with around 2,000 cases expected. 

Working with the FCA and HM Treasury, the service plans major reforms over the next two years to improve consistency and help firms resolve issues earlier. To support this, it is consulting on increasing the case fee to £680 and the compulsory levy to £86m - which is still below 2023/24 levels. The FOS is also planning to simplify its billing process. The Consultation is open until 21 January 2026.

To read the consultation on the FOS' Plans and Budget 2026/27, please click here. 

Regulatory developments for FCA regulated entities

FCA publishes data on skilled person reviews for first two quarters of 2025/26

The FCA has published data on Skilled Person Reviews for the first two quarters of 2025/26. Under s.166 of FSMA, the regulator can get a view from a third party (the skilled person) if it is concerned about aspects of a regulated firm's activities or want further analysis.

The FCA commissioned 16 reviews in total for the first half of the 2025/2026 year, with 10 in Q1 (April – June) and 6 in Q2 (July – September). The Q1 reviews were spread across consumer investments (2), insurance (1), retail banking (2), payments and digital assets (1), and wholesale markets (4). Q2 activity was concentrated in insurance (2), payments and digital assets (1), retail banking (1) and wholesale sectors (2).

As it stands the FCA appears on track to initiate fewer Skilled Person Reviews this year than the 2024/2025 year when 47 reports were commissioned (23 of which involved firms in the consumer investments market, for which there have only been 2 so far this year). 

To access the FCA's data please click here. 

FCA proposes to reduce costs on industry by streamlining transaction reporting requirements

The FCA has proposed a number of changes to streamline transaction reporting requirements. The FCA receives over 7 billion MiFID transaction reports a year. These reports are used to support the cleanliness, transparency, and resilience of UK markets. However, the current annual cost of MiFID transaction reporting to the industry is £493m. The FCA is seeking to reduce the costs for firms, in order to support growth and to improve the quality of the data that they receive. Given this, the FCA has proposed to:

• Remove foreign exchange derivatives from reporting requirements, reducing costs for over 400 firms;
• Remove reporting requirements for 6 million financial instruments including equities, bonds and certain derivatives that are only traded on EU trading venues; and
• Reduce the period for correcting historic reporting errors from 5 to 3 years, lowering the number of transaction reports that need to be resubmitted by a third.

The proposed changes are estimated by the FCA to reduce the cost of MiFID transaction reporting to approximately £385m, resulting in a saving to industry of £108m. The FCA has confirmed that they will work in lockstep with the Bank of England and the Treasury to remove any unnecessary duplication of transaction and post-trade reporting requirements as part of a long-term approach. 

To read more, please click here.

Emerging risks

FCA collaborates with industry to help shape future of UK's crypto markets

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has accepted the RegTech platform, Eunice, into its Regulatory Sandbox to explore an industry-led solution to improve transparency of the UK's crypto markets.

Working alongside major firms like Coinbase, Crypto.com and Kraken, Eunice aims to create an innovative solution in the sandbox for disclosing important information about crypto assets.

Eunice intends to experiment with disclosure templates to achieve maximum transparency. The outcomes from this sandbox test will inform the FCA's approach to disclosure requirements for crypto assets.

To read more, please click here.

With thanks to this week's contributors: Daniel Parkin, Dorian Nunzek, Damien O'Malley, Ben Simmonds, Haiying Li, James Parsons, and Lauren Butler