Once again, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has announced a “game-changing” reform. This time, it’s called Targeted Support — a new licence allowing financial firms to give “tailored suggestions” without conducting a full assessment of the customer’s needs. The regulator claims this will help 18 million more people get financial advice.
But let’s be clear: this is not empowerment. It’s engineered dependency — and a dangerous step back toward the misselling scandals of the past.
Old Scandals, New Language
We’ve seen this before — the same promises, the same rhetoric, the same results.
- 20th Century: Home service insurance — armies of doorstep salesmen “helping” families save, often flogging endowments that failed to deliver. And pension misselling to mineworkers — workers steered out of good employer schemes into personal plans that left them worse off.
- 2000s: Bancassurance — banks bundling unsuitable investment and protection products with mortgages and loans. Precipice bonds, mini-bonds, and pension transfers — dressed as empowerment, built on exploitation.
Each wave was sold as “simpler, more accessible guidance.”
Each ended in scandal, compensation schemes, and another round of consumer distrust.
The New Misselling Machine
Under this new regime, firms will be free to recommend products — even complex investment schemes — without providing holistic, regulated financial advice. Consumers won’t receive a full suitability assessment, and crucially, they’ll lose access to complaint resolution and legal recourse if things go wrong.
This isn’t financial inclusion. It’s financial exposure.
The FCA says firms will “still need to prove the advice is suitable” — yet without a regulated advice framework, there’s no clear mechanism to hold anyone accountable when “targeted support” turns out to be a sales funnel in disguise.
This is not protection. It’s permission.
A Captured Regulator, A Familiar Agenda
The language of the announcement — growth, confidence, investment — reads straight from the deregulation playbook. The same script used before every crisis: deregulate distribution, loosen consumer safeguards, and justify it as “support.”
The FCA is no longer just regulating the market; it’s now participating in it — cheerleading for capital inflows and product distribution, while eroding the very trust it was created to uphold.
What This Means for Ordinary People
Millions will now be nudged toward “investment solutions” that may be unsuitable, opaque, or costly — without full understanding, transparency, or recourse.
Automation will compound the problem. AI-driven recommendation engines will make complex decisions at scale, optimised for growth, not consumer welfare. When these systems mis-sell — and they will — who will the victim even complain to? The algorithm? The regulator that licensed it?
We’re sleepwalking into algorithmic misselling — at national scale.
The Alternative: Empowerment, Not Extraction
There is another way.
At the Academy of Life Planning, we champion financial education, not financial engineering.
We help citizens plan their own lives before they plan their money — through self-directed, holistic frameworks like the GAME Plan.
We train planners to guide, not sell. To empower, not exploit.
To restore structural trust where institutional trust has failed.
History Is Repeating. But We Don’t Have To.
Every cycle of deregulation begins with good intentions — and ends with a reckoning.
The question is whether we’ll recognise the pattern before it’s too late.
If 18 million people are about to be drawn into a system that confuses support with sales, we must ensure they have independent education, unbiased tools, and human guidance that puts their sovereignty first.
Because true progress isn’t about giving the City more freedom to sell.
It’s about giving citizens the freedom to choose.
Steve Conley
Founder, Academy of Life Planning
Replacing Extraction with Empowerment
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steve.conley@aolp.co.uk | +44 (0)7850 102070
Academy of Life Planning 