FCA Compliance Training Requirements 2026

The FCA's published list of 2024 fines totals £176 million, more than three times the 2023 figure. The big cases keep coming back to the same themes: controls that didn't keep pace with the business, and people who didn't know what the rules meant for their own job.

That's the gap this guide is about. The expectations are spread across several frameworks, and the dates keep moving. Below you'll find what each one requires, where firms trip up, and how to build training that stands up when a supervisor asks for proof.

What is FCA compliance training?

FCA compliance training is everything a regulated firm does to make sure its people can do their jobs within the rules. That means conduct standards, individual accountability, customer outcomes and financial crime prevention. It spans several frameworks at once and runs all year, not as a single course or annual exercise.

The FCA doesn't prescribe a format. It does expect firms to employ people with the skills, knowledge and expertise their roles demand (SYSC 5.1 in the FCA Handbook). Where a firm advises or deals with retail clients, the Training and Competence sourcebook (TC) adds more detail.

In practice, a 2026 program has four pillars:

• SM&CR obligations for Senior Managers, Certified Persons and Conduct Rules staff.
• Consumer Duty understanding for anyone who shapes or delivers customer outcomes.
• Conduct Rules, including the extension to non-financial misconduct.
• Financial crime, covering anti-money laundering, sanctions, fraud and market abuse, which sits alongside the other three with equal weight.

Which firms need FCA compliance training?

Every FCA-authorised firm has training obligations. The depth varies with the firm's type, size and activities, but no regulated firm is exempt.

Under the SM&CR, firms fall into three categories: Limited Scope, Core or Enhanced. Enhanced firms are the largest and most complex, and PS26/6 raised the thresholds for that category from 10 July 2026. Most FCA-regulated businesses sit in Core. Limited Scope firms have lighter requirements, but Conduct Rules training still applies to them.

Consumer Duty obligations apply to firms that deliver products or services to retail customers. Financial crime training applies to anyone inside the regulated sector under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017.

SM&CR training requirements in 2026

The Senior Managers and Certification Regime is the FCA's framework for individual accountability. Everyone in a regulated role sits somewhere in it, and each group needs different training.

Senior Managers

Senior Managers hold FCA-approved functions. Their training should cover their Statements of Responsibilities, the four Senior Manager Conduct Rules and what "reasonable steps" looks like when something goes wrong. Personal liability follows the individual, so abstract awareness isn't enough. They need to understand it in terms of their own business area.

Certified Persons

Certified staff perform functions listed under SYSC 27. The firm has to assess their fitness and propriety and issue a certificate every year. Training should support that assessment through the year, not just at onboarding. A module ticked off twelve months ago doesn't show anyone is still competent today.

Conduct Rules staff

Most of your workforce falls here. They need to understand how the Conduct Rules apply to their role specifically. A generic slide deck about integrity won't do. A mortgage adviser and a payments operations analyst face different risks, and the training should show it.

Consumer Duty training obligations

The Consumer Duty has applied since July 2023. It's built around four outcomes: products and services, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support. Staff in customer-facing, advisory and product roles need to know what a good outcome looks like in their own job, not in the abstract.

The FCA hasn't gone quiet on the Duty. Its Consumer Duty hub keeps adding good and poor practice reviews, including ones published in September and October 2026 on payments firms, contracts for difference and fair value in consumer finance. If you train once and file it, you're relying on a snapshot while the supervisory picture keeps moving.

Two habits make Consumer Duty training stick:

• Feed outcomes data back into content. Complaints, call reviews and chat transcripts show where customers get confused. Turn those patterns into short lessons.
• Brief the board on what people learned, as well as who finished. It's easier to show a supervisor that you're acting on evidence if the evidence already exists.

The Duty also has a conduct-rule edge. Individual Conduct Rule 6, "You must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers," applies where the firm's activities are covered by the Duty.

Conduct Rules training: scope, evidence and reporting

The Individual Conduct Rules apply to most people working in an authorised firm. Four further rules apply to Senior Managers only. Section 64B names suitable training as a step firms must consider, so it is the usual way to meet the duty.

Good training helps people recognize when a rule applies to their role, what a breach looks like in practice, and what to do when they see one.

Reporting is narrower than most people assume. Senior Managers' firms must notify the FCA within seven business days of concluding disciplinary action for a Conduct Rule breach. For other Conduct Rules staff, firms report breaches that resulted in disciplinary action once a year. Disciplinary action means a formal written warning, suspension, dismissal, or a reduction or recovery of pay.

On evidence, a screenshot of 100% completion isn't a strong answer to "how do you know they understood?" Firms should be able to show that training was role-specific, tested for understanding and refreshed when the rules changed.

Non-financial misconduct: the September 2026 change

On 1 September 2026, the FCA's amendments to the Code of Conduct (COCON) took effect, extending the Conduct Rules to serious work-related non-financial misconduct at non-bank firms, with guidance published in PS25/23. Banks were already covered. The conduct caught includes bullying and harassment that violates a colleague's dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.

The bar is high. Minor incidents that don't have that purpose or effect aren't breaches, and the FCA aligned the seriousness threshold with the Equality Act's definition of harassment. That doesn't make it a policy-only issue, though. Managers carry real exposure.

Under the guidance, managers aren't held responsible for failing to prevent misconduct they couldn't reasonably have known about, or couldn't act on. The examples of reasonable steps are practical: intervene to stop inappropriate behavior, take complaints seriously, and make it safe to speak up. That's a training brief in itself.

Separately, the "all reasonable steps" duty to prevent sexual harassment under the Employment Rights Act 2025 started on 30 October 2026. It applies in Great Britain and amends the Equality Act 2010, so it overlaps with the FCA's expectations in the same places.

Common FCA training failures and what they cost

Enforcement shows where programs break down. The pattern is usually growth outrunning controls.

Starling Bank was fined about £29 million in 2024 for failings in its financial crime systems and controls and for breaching a voluntary requirement. Monzo was fined £21.1 million in July 2025. The FCA found weak customer due diligence and transaction monitoring, and Monzo opened more than 26,000 high-risk accounts in breach of a restriction. Mishcon de Reya's summary of the Final Notice notes that staff were poorly trained and under-resourced.

It's tempting to read those cases as stories about big banks. Smaller firms face the same test, scaled down: do the people doing the work understand the rules well enough to spot a problem, and would your records show it if the FCA asked?

The lesson is that financial crime knowledge has to scale with the business. Products change, customer volumes grow and typologies shift. Onboarding-only training can't keep up.

How to build an FCA-compliant training program in 2026

An FCA-compliant program is a structured, role-mapped system that produces evidence as it runs. Here's the order that works.

1. Map your population

   Identify who's a Senior Manager, a Certified Person or Conduct Rules staff, and who's covered by the Consumer Duty and the Money Laundering Regulations. Keep the mapping on file. A supervisor may ask for it.

2. Assess needs by role

   Each job needs its own view of which rules apply, what they mean day to day and what a breach would look like.

3. Cover all four pillars

   SM&CR, Consumer Duty, Conduct Rules including non-financial misconduct, and financial crime. A gap in one pillar is a gap in your defense.

4. Deliver little and often

   Short sessions let you roll out new guidance quickly and keep knowledge fresh between formal refreshers.

5. Build the evidence trail

   Keep records that are role-specific and timestamped. Add assessment results and a log of how content changed after new FCA guidance. If you need to prove it, you'll be glad it's there.

6. Plan for regulatory change

   2026 alone brought PS26/6 in April and July, the non-financial misconduct rules in September and the harassment duty in October. Decide who owns each update and how fast it reaches learners.

Three mistakes show up again and again. Firms train everyone on the same generic content, so nobody sees their own job in it. They treat the annual module as the program, so updates wait months. And they keep completion data in one system and policy changes in another, so nobody can show how the two connect. Fixing those three gets you most of the way.

Role-specific courses help here. 5Mins has FCA-focused courses on the Senior Managers and Certification Regime, the FCA Code of Conduct, the Consumer Duty and anti-money laundering.

Why microlearning beats annual e-learning for FCA compliance

A standard annual module asks people to absorb a year of regulation in one sitting, then leaves them alone for the next eleven months. The FCA doesn't ask whether you ran a course. It asks whether people are competent and whether your controls work.

5Mins delivers 95%+ completion, against completion under 5% on a legacy LMS. For a financial services example, AZA Finance lifted training participation from 30-40% to 80% (see the AZA Finance customer story). The platform offers 500+ accredited compliance courses within a library of 20,000+ microlessons, and compliance content is kept up to date as regulations change. Managers get a Team Progress Email showing their team's overdue courses and those due in the next 30 days, and learners get reminders in Slack, Microsoft Teams, email and push.

Factor		Annual legacy LMS module
Completion	95%+	Under 5%
Typical lesson	Microlessons of about 5 minutes	One long module a year
Content updates	Kept up to date as regulations change	Often waits for the next annual cycle

If you'd rather turn your own policies into training, AI Studio includes an AI Course Creator and a Video Creator, and most documents become a video in about 10 minutes. You can also build practice scenarios with AI Roleplays, with each attempt scored out of 100 against a rubric you can edit.

Conclusion

FCA compliance training in 2026 comes down to one question: can you show your people understand the rules that apply to them? Section 64B sets the duty, PS26/6 hasn't changed it, and the non-financial misconduct rules have widened what it covers.

Map the roles, train in short regular bursts, keep records that show understanding rather than attendance, and have a named owner for each regulatory change. Do that and your next supervisory conversation gets much easier.

This article gives general information on FCA compliance training requirements as of November 2026. It isn't legal advice.