New beginnings – credible deterrence – 2010-2012
Enforcement Watch launched in May 2010 with editor, a youthful Adam Epstein declaring: “At various times, I have heard regulators talk about getting tough. Now for the first time we are seeing them act on their rhetoric.” The first edition reported a then-record individual fine of £2.8m for market abuse and a “heavy” penalty of £700,000 against Tenon. A new penalty regime, a 23% increase in the FSA’s enforcement budget and the first insider dealing imprisonment signalled the era of credible deterrence. Readers may recognise, in the report that “six people were arrested and 16 addresses were searched,” the beginnings of Operation Tabernula.
LIBOR and the birth of the twin-peaks regime 2012-2014
By edition 8 (September 2012), LIBOR dominated. Barclays received the largest ever FSA fine (£59.5m) and we presciently reported that "the Barclays' fine appears to be the first of many to come.” It was: record penalties against RBS and Rabobank followed, alongside growing SFO involvement. In parallel, the “new regulatory architecture” came into force, splitting the FSA into the FCA and PRA. By Issue 12, the emphasis had shifted decisively to personal accountability, with the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013 flagged as a “further weapon” for pursuing individuals.
Culture, individual accountability and the Senior Managers Regime 2014-2016
This period is when “culture" stopped being an incidental observation and became an explicit regulatory pillar, tightly bound to the design and roll-out of the Senior Managers Regime. Issue 13 (May 2014), the FCA’s first full year, flagged “culture and its attendant conduct” as the headline theme. Enforcement Watch tracked the SMR from the 2013 Parliamentary Commission recommendation through consultation to the March 2016 commencement, documenting how abstract values were translated into individually-attributable duties. Running in parallel was a backward-looking reassessment: the Andrew Green QC report into the FSA’s enforcement failures around HBOS delivered “damning criticisms,” reinforcing exactly the case for individual accountability that the SMR was designed to address.
Financial Crime and a new focus (2017-2020)
Under Mark Steward, the FCA's Director of Enforcement and Market Oversight, the tone shifted. In January 2017 he declared that the fall in headline fines did not mean the FCA had "gone soft”; the era of blockbuster corporate settlements was giving way to a more contested landscape driven by the SMR. He warned that firms and individuals would increasingly find themselves in conflict: “in the clinches,” early settlement and the instinct to fight were "highly likely, if not inevitably, to be in conflict." By September 2017, he reported a 75% increase in investigations and challenged the FCA to become "a lot more efficient, strategic and focussed" without additional resources. On financial crime, his April 2019 speech signalled that AML investigations would be conducted on a dual-track basis: keeping both civil and criminal options open, and he shifted the FCA's market abuse focus to a 60:40 split between insider dealing and market manipulation, arguing the FCA should take on "the hardest cases."
The headline cases followed. In 2019, the FCA imposed its largest ever AML fine, £102.2m against Standard Chartered Bank. Commerzbank AG was fined £37.8m in 2020. These were accompanied by actions against smaller firms and individuals, and deepening cooperation with the NCA and SFO, signalling a coordinated, multi-agency approach to financial crime.
The FCA under the microscope - Tribunal criticism becomes a recurring headline 2020-2023
From around 2020, the FCA itself came under the microscope. In the Forsyth decision (2021), the Tribunal overturned findings of a lack of integrity against a CEO and delivered “excoriating criticism" of the FCA and PRA, describing disclosure failings as "serious" and "largely due to human error which may have been caused by a basic lack of competence." The regulators’ conduct, said the Tribunal, had fallen "well below the standards" the regulated community was entitled to expect, and it made six formal recommendations under its statutory powers. The frustration deepened in Seiler, Whitestone and Raitzin (2023), where the Tribunal unanimously rejected the FCA's case against three former Julius Baer employees, calling the investigation’s length “on any view unacceptable” and finding the FCA had "swallowed hook, line and sinker" one version of events. Pointedly, the Tribunal warned: “there are only so many times the Authority can apologise for its failings, insist that lessons have been learned and then expect that those affected should simply move on." Average investigation length had risen to 40 months - 64 months where cases reached the Tribunal.
A new leadership, a new tempo - 2023-2026
Therese Chambers and Steve Smart took the helm as joint Executive Directors with a clear mandate: fewer, faster cases. Chambers publicly committed to “doing fewer investigations faster,” and the results have been tangible. The Burford prosecution reached a charging decision in 23 months, against an average of 42 months for cases closed the previous year. AML enforcement continued at scale: Monzo (£21m), Nationwide (£44m) and Barclays (£42m across two cases) were all fined for financial crime control failures. The FCA’s reach expanded into new territory, its first data protection prosecution, criminal proceedings against crypto exchange HTX, and charges against a cryptoasset ATM operator. At the Upper Tribunal, the dynamic shifted again. The Tribunal delivered substantive wins for the FCA, including the prohibition of former Barclays CEO Jes Staley, but consistently moderated the penalties the FCA sought. The pattern culminated in Banque Havilland (February 2026), where the Tribunal upheld a finding of the most serious breach but slashed the £10m fine by 60%, calling it “arbitrary.” The theme continues in this 50th edition, with the FCA’s victory over Odey marked by a further penalty reduction.
And the next 16 years?
Predicting where enforcement will be in 16 years’ time is almost impossible, because the most important themes of the last 16 were not planned. They were largely driven by external events. The banking crisis gave us higher penalties and the SMCR. LIBOR reshaped benchmark regulation. #MeToo brought non-financial misconduct into the regulatory mainstream. The collapse of London Capital & Finance introduced a focus (and an entire FCA team) on financial promotions. Cryptoassets, scarcely on anyone’s radar a decade ago, have opened an entirely new enforcement frontier. If the past is any guide, the next era will be shaped by the crisis, scandal or technological shift that has not yet happened. But the underlying dynamics tracked across 50 editions of Enforcement Watch: individual versus corporate accountability, speed versus fairness, the ever-expanding perimeter, and the Upper Tribunal’s role as a check on the regulator will remain the constants against which whatever comes next will play out.