The Financial Conduct Authority published PS26/15 on 3 August 2026, finalising a slimmed-down UK transaction reporting regime. The headline figures, per the policy statement: reporting fields cut from 65 to 52, obligations removed for seven million instruments tradeable only on EU venues, the default back-reporting period reduced from five years to three, and foreign exchange derivatives removed from the scope of reporting altogether — a change the regulator says reduces costs “for over 400 UK firms”. The FCA expects the package to cut firms’ reporting costs by more than £100m annually. The new regime comes into force on 3 April 2028, with a flexible supervisory approach applying from publication.
The stated reasoning is unglamorous. The FCA describes persistent data-quality problems with FX derivative transaction reports and says those reports are partially duplicative of data it already receives under UK EMIR, which it considers the more appropriate source for monitoring these markets. All respondents to the consultation supported the proposal, per the feedback summary. This is housekeeping conducted in public, which is the only kind this desk trusts.
The line’s exact position is where the summaries go wrong. The policy statement draws the carve-out by contract type, not by retail wrapper: it applies to options, futures, swaps, forward rate agreements and other derivative contracts relating to currencies, settled physically or in cash, and expressly not to derivative contracts relating to cryptoassets. Nothing in it announces the departure of the products a retail client actually holds — and the made rules published alongside the statement still carry field-population instructions for contracts for difference and spread bets: for both, the buyer is the counterparty going long and the seller the counterparty going short; for spread bets, quantity is the monetary value wagered per point of movement in the underlying, and price is that underlying’s reference price. That is not the drafting of a regime that has stopped asking. Firms with a view on where their own book sits should read the instrument, not the summary — this one included.
The consumer point deserves stating plainly. Transaction reporting is an obligation owed by firms to the regulator — surveillance data, not a customer safeguard — and PS26/15 changes nothing about what a retail client is entitled to. The leverage caps stand, negative balance protection stands, the client-money rules stand, and eligible customers of an authorised firm retain recourse to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme should that firm fail owing them money, a scheme that has never covered a losing position and does not begin now. A lighter filing burden for over four hundred firms is a saving for over four hundred firms.
What protects the reader is the authorisation itself, checkable on the Register — not the volume of data a firm files afterwards.
The standing caution: substantial risk of loss attaches to these products whether or not the regulator is collecting a report about them.