FSA slow to approve new firms

Law firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC) says the Financial Services Authority (FSA) takes an average of five months to approve a new finance firm, 7.4 times as long as it did in 2007 before the credit crunch, the Times reports.

RPC compiled the data through Freedom of Information requests. Jonathan Davies, regulatory partner at RPC, asked whether the FSA was “being more rigorous or whether it is because it is haemorrhaging its more experienced staff and cannot keep up with the workload”.

The FSA said it had increased the “intensity with which we scrutinise authorisations”. The FSA said it aimed to authorise a business within six months if its application was complete and within a year if data or details were missing.