FCA financial promotions: what the rules mean for your website

If your firm is FCA-regulated, there's a fact about your website that often gets missed until something goes wrong: your website is a financial promotion. Not just the ad you ran last month or the Instagram post about rates, the homepage, the service pages, the calculator, the wording on your contact form. That brings it inside the FCA's conduct rules, and it changes how a website for a broker, adviser or lender should be built and maintained.

This is a plain-English overview written from a web design perspective, what the rules mean for how a site is built. It is general information, not compliance advice. Your compliance function or a specialist adviser should sign off anything specific to your permissions, and the FCA Handbook is the authority on the detail.

The core standard: fair, clear and not misleading

The central requirement sits in COBS 4.2 of the FCA Handbook: financial promotions must be fair, clear and not misleading. Those are three separate tests, and it's worth separating them:

• Fair: risks can't be disguised or played down. Risk information needs comparable prominence to the benefits, not a grey footnote under a bright headline.
• Clear: the language and structure have to suit the audience actually reading it, not the person who wrote it.
• Not misleading: benefits and risks presented in balance.

The important nuance for anyone designing a site: this is a principles-based standard, and the FCA looks at the overall impressiona promotion creates, not merely whether each individual sentence is factually true. That's a design question as much as a copywriting one. A page can be composed entirely of accurate statements and still fail, because the layout, hierarchy, and visual weight tell a rosier story than the words do. Big confident headline, risk warning in 10px grey at the bottom: every statement true, overall impression misleading.

The bit that catches websites out: it has to stay compliant

COBS 4.10 requires firms to take reasonable steps to ensure a promotion remains fair, clear and not misleading for as long as it's live.

For a print ad, that's a short window. A website is a standing promotion: live continuously, for years. Rates change, products get withdrawn, rules get updated, and the page carries on saying what it said in 2023. A “build it and forget it” website isn't just a marketing weakness for a regulated firm; it accumulates genuine compliance risk with every month it goes untouched. This is the single strongest argument for treating a regulated firm's website as something maintained rather than something delivered once.

Consumer Duty raised the bar again

The Consumer Duty, in force since July 2023, added a consumer understanding outcome: communications must support customers' understanding, meet their information needs, and equip them to make effective decisions. It moved the test from “did we disclose it?” to “did they actually understand it?”

In its published findings on consumer understanding, the FCA flagged recurring weaknesses including communications that were inaccessible or overly complex, and weak evidence that firms had tested whether their communications were understood. It also highlighted good practice that will sound familiar to anyone who works on websites, one firm used analytics to find where customers got stuck in the journey, tested improvements, and monitored whether outcomes actually improved.

That's notable: the regulator is describing user testing and analytics as good compliance practice. Accessibility, plain language, and a tested user journey stop being nice-to-haves and start being evidence.

Practical implications for how the site is built

• Risk warnings belong in the design system. If they can be styled into invisibility, eventually they will be. Give them a defined, prominent treatment.
• Say clearly what you are.Brokers should be unambiguous that they're a broker introducing customers to a lender rather than the lender, and be upfront where commission may be received.
• Make content easy to update.If changing a rate means emailing a developer and waiting three days, the site will drift out of date. That's a compliance problem created by a technical decision.
• Accessibility is part of understanding. Poor contrast, tiny type and unlabelled forms all undermine the argument that your communications are clear.
• Keep records. Version history of what the site said and when is far easier to produce if the site is on a system that tracks it.

Third-party approvals and the gateway

One area worth knowing exists: since early 2024, an authorised firm that wants to approve financial promotions for unauthorised third parties generally needs a specific permission through the FCA's financial promotions gateway. Firms promoting their own business in their own name don't need that gateway permission, but remain fully subject to the COBS 4 conduct rules. If you're hosting or promoting another firm's products on your site, that's a conversation to have with your compliance adviser before it goes live.

The rules are moving in 2026

Worth flagging rather than treating today's position as settled: the FCA is actively consulting on this area. It has been reviewing the financial promotion rules for consumer credit in CONC 3, and has a mortgage rule review consultation running through summer 2026. If your site was built to the rules as they stood a couple of years ago, it's worth a review, and worth checking the current Handbook rather than relying on an article, including this one.

Common questions

Is our whole website really a financial promotion?In practice, any part inviting or inducing someone to engage in a regulated activity is likely to be caught, which typically covers far more of a regulated firm's site than just its ads. Where the boundary falls for your specific pages is a question for your compliance adviser.

Can a web designer make our site compliant? No, and be wary of anyone who claims they can. A designer can build a site that supports compliance: prominent risk treatments, accessible plain-language content, easy updating, version history. Sign-off remains yours.

How often should a regulated firm review its website? There's no universal number, but given the obligation to keep promotions fair and clear while live, a scheduled review, plus a immediate check whenever products, rates or rules change, is far safer than waiting for an annual audit to catch it.

We build and maintain websites for regulated and professional services firms across Devon and the South West, see the wider guide to professional services websites, or how we approach web design in Devon. If your site hasn't been reviewed in a while, a free audit is a sensible starting point.