The FCA’s CP26/24, Simplifying consumer investment disclosures, opened on 2 July 2026 and closed to responses on 21 August 2026. It is a consultation paper. It is not the Handbook, and nothing in it obliges any firm to change a published cost disclosure today. The regulator’s page says it intends to publish a policy statement with final rules by the end of 2026; as of this writing that page carries a last-updated date of 2 July 2026 and links no such statement.
That gap — consultation closed, no final rules on that page — is the state readers most often misread.
What the paper proposes
Two strands. The first is consolidation. Costs, charges and firm information currently sit split across COBS 6.1ZA, for MiFID and IDD-scope business, and COBS 6.1 for non-MiFID business. The FCA proposes to merge them into a single new chapter, COBS 6A, and to move the high-level requirements in COBS 2.2/2.2A across too. The paper frames this as fulfilling a commitment in PS25/20, the December 2025 Consumer Composite Investments rules, to review the MiFID-derived requirements during 2026.
The second strand is cash, and it has teeth for anyone leaving money on account.
The cash-holdings proposal
Chapter 3 of the consultation paper proposes rule changes to how firms tell retail clients what interest they earn and what fees they pay on cash. The FCA says it is codifying its existing position on “double dipping”, set out in its Dear CEO letter of December 2023: firms that charge fees on holding client money must pass on interest on that money in full, and firms that retain such interest should not be permitted to charge fees for holding it.
Codifying is the operative word: the expectation has been on the record since 2023, and CP26/24 proposes to write it into rules.
What a reader can and cannot take from it
The consultation states that it applies to firms carrying out MiFID or equivalent third country business, firms engaged in insurance distribution activities, and firms carrying out other forms of designated investment business. Whether a given broker sits inside that scope is a question about that firm’s permissions, not one this paper answers for the reader. Nor does the paper create cost disclosure out of nothing: MiFID-derived costs and charges obligations already exist; the proposal consolidates them.
The practical reading is narrow. A firm describing any of this as a rule it already meets is describing a proposal — small print of the sort we went through in Trade Nation, reviewed. Read the cost disclosure a broker publishes now, not the one a consultation might require later.
Trading involves substantial risk of loss. FX is FCA-regulated in the UK, and the Financial Services Register is the only record that states what a firm is permitted to do — check it before you open an account. The Register is not a decoration. None of the above is financial advice.