The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has published its business plan for 2019-20, outlining several initiatives that will affect wealth management firms.

In the report the FCA's chairman introduces a new phrase - "technology change" - to the English language and issues financial firms with a chilling warning to the effect that in future they must "focus more on the outcomes we seek." He leaves no room for doubt about who he means by "we."

The FCA's chief executive dwells on his duty to reverse the choices that the UK has made in previous decades, stating that his organisation is dedicated to helping the country's financial sector leave the European Union in an orderly way and to go on organising its so-called "temporary permissions regime."

The FCA's priorities fall into the following categories.

• Strengthening its contacts with regulators overseas, especially in Europe.

• Improving the governance and cultures of financial firms. Here the FCA wants to change financial firms' cultures (the cumbersome phrase it uses is "supporting culture transformation within financial services").  
It also, somewhat mysteriously, expresses a desire to "explore the role of ‘purpose’ in culture." It never explains this enigmatic phrase. Indeed, it only mentions the word 'purpose' ten times in its document, averring that the "driving purpose" of a culture leads various people to take personal responsibility for "consumer and market outcomes." It also states that "purpose" is one of the four "drivers of behaviour," the others being "leadership, reward and managing people." Purpose, in its opinion, is also a "theme" and a "driving force in creating and sustaining healthy cultures." Such cultures, moreover, can be "purposeful."

The FCA will, in the next year or so, extend its Senior Managers and Certification Regime to all financial firms. It will also open its new "directory" (actually a register of certain people in financial services) up to the public.

The FCA is also keen to look at the ways in which firms remunerate their executives. It states: "We review firms’ remuneration arrangements to identify if they are encouraging staff to act in ways that could harm consumers or markets." It adds that it will "explore" the theme of remueration and incentives and worries about the harm that might occur if people are "paying too much due to the level of remuneration in the distribution chain." A "committee of the board" at the FCA is dedicated to remuneration at firms.

At one point in the plan the FCA expresses a desire to review firms' "remuneration and recognition practices." Nowhere in the document does it mention any definition of the word 'recognition,' although it does once (and most enigmatically) refer without any explanation to "mutual recognition."

• Operational resilience. The regulator's voyage of discovery through the English language continues with its plans for operational resilience in 2019-20. It says that it is worried about "inadequately controlled outsourcing." It repeats the decades-long trope that "critical services may be outsourced but responsibility cannot." It expresses a desire to gain a better understanding of "the current outsourcing/third-party service provider environment." It also wants to "promote our guidance on firms outsourcing to the cloud and other third-party IT service providers."

The regulator is convinced that change management, such as IT system upgrades or transfers of data to new systems, is the single highest cause of something it calls "failure." Later on, it lumps change management together with the idea of someone overseeing "third-party providers." Here its commentary on this elusive chimera dries up.

The FCA wants to spend 2019-20 doing some "ethical hacking," the better to find out how financial firms are coping in the cyber world. Firms might draw some comfort from the undeniable fact that if it is ethical for such an outfit as the FCA to hack into people's systems, it is also ethical for everyone else to do so.

The regulator plans to try to find out why firms have trouble identifying their main assets, detecting cyber-attacks on these assets and improving the odds of recovering from them. It then wants to talk to small firms about what to do in the face of cyber-attacks.

• The fight against financial crime. The FCA wants to talk to the Government - its owner, which it sees - (for a reason that it does not explain) as a separate entity, about this subject and to "share intelligence." It emphasises the value of analytical software. It wants to "use technology to be more intrusive in assessing the effectiveness of firms’ own systems and controls." It says that it has "started information and intelligence sharing," whatever that means. The only agency with which it ever discloses a desire in the document to share information is the Global Financial Innovation Network, which it chairs. This is a group of 29 regulators and other organisations that concern themselves with "innovation," a word that the FCA describes in one part of the report as financial technology or "FinTech." In the coming year it wants to ask various unidentified parties whether regulation (or, as it puts it, "the regulatory framework") is a barrier to this "innovation." Elsewhere, it often mentions the word "innovation" in the same breath as data, although it does not explain the connection between the two. It also thinks that innovation is something that someone can "deliver."

• Next year the regulator wants to do more to weigh up differences between various generations of people. It wants to host a conference about inter-generational differences.

• The future of regulation. The FCA wants to ask various parties about the future of regulation. One exercise that is firmly in its sights is a review of the costs and benefits of regulation for small firms. There will be few prizes for anyone who guesses that the regulator will eventually plump for more onerous regulation rather than none at all.

One area of inquiry will be demographic change, a phenomenon that affects HNW clients as much as (if not more than) others. The FCA will publish a discussion paper on the subject. It will ask whether regulation is likely to hamper innovation, and whether it can change its approach.

It also wants to publish its first annual statement on "perimeter issues," i.e things that pertain to the limits of its power. There has never been a moment since its inception in 2013 when it ever wanted to retreat from these limits.

One fascinating objective that the regulator has for the year 2019-20 is to "review the costs and benefits of regulation for small firms." Firms ought not to become too enthusiastic about this apparently volcanic statement, promising as it does a full and honest inquiry into the overweening burden that the FCA's (and every major Western regulator's) supervision places on small firms, to the competitive benefit of larger firms, with all the consequences that that has for "consolidation," i.e. takeovers of the small by the large, which have long been taking place. For a regulator to tackle such an issue head-on, the world would have to change first.