FCA enforcement action against a major insurer
A coordinated response to an FCA enforcement investigation resulted in a substantially reduced penalty for our client, a major UK insurer.
Client Challenge
The FCA opened an enforcement investigation into historic conduct failings within our client's claims handling function. The client faced a significant financial penalty, the risk of a public censure that would attract trade press coverage, and an internal question about how much of the investigation to run through external counsel versus internal compliance.
Legal Strategy
David Okonjo-Reid, drawing on his own decade inside the FCA's enforcement division, advised a strategy of substantial cooperation with the investigation — providing the regulator with a clear, proactively-compiled account of the failing and the remediation already underway — while contesting specific factual findings the evidence did not support. Anjali Mehta led the firm's coordination of the client's internal investigation to ensure the two workstreams reinforced rather than contradicted each other.
Turning Point
The client's early, voluntary remediation programme — implemented before the FCA's provisional findings were even issued — became a central mitigating factor the regulator formally credited in its penalty calculation, a outcome only available because the client acted on our advice to begin remediation before the investigation concluded, not after.
The FCA's final penalty was substantially reduced from its provisional position, crediting the client's cooperation and proactive remediation. No public censure beyond the standard enforcement notice was issued.
Business Impact
The reduced penalty and contained public disclosure allowed the client to close the matter without the sustained trade press coverage a contested enforcement action would likely have generated, and the remediation programme has since been cited by the client's board as a template for handling conduct risk more broadly.