We offer you the chance to start your career and make a real difference.
About Us
At the FCA, we help to protect financial consumers and make markets work well by regulating the conduct of over 59,000 businesses. Our ambition is to become a more innovative, more assertive and more adaptive regulator; one that fully capitalises on data and technology, ensures consumer protection and market integrity, and responds well to the challenges we face. We’re looking for bright, enthusiastic and values driven graduates to join our diverse and highly capable teams across the FCA.
About the Programme
Programme Length: Two years
Programme Type: Rotational
Bring your passion for problem solving and strategic thinking into the constantly evolving world of financial regulation.
Supervision, Policy & Competition (SPC) oversees every business providing financial products and services in the UK. The work of SPC is vital in protecting customers and the integrity of the market by ensuring firms work ethically and to the highest standards.
SPC is led by Sheldon Mills Executive Director for Consumer and Competition and Sarah Pritchard Executive Director for Markets. SPC is the largest division within the FCA and is responsible for:
- Monitoring the sectors by reviewing and assessing business models, providing guidance and planning future changes
- Delivering and integrating effective Policy insights into our competition and supervisory work - this helps to ensure markets function well and better enables us to identify and avoid consumer harm
- Engaging with firms to ensure interests of consumers and integrity of markets is at the heart of their business
- Exploring and analysing identified risks within firms through firm-specific and cross-firm work
- Supporting diversity and inclusion across the industry
- Ensuring firms behave appropriately when detriment arises
- Prudential supervision of all firms not regulated by the PRA
- Working with trade bodies, advisers and other third parties to help identify and communicate trends, and gauge the horizon of risks in the market
There are three routes you could take when applying for our SPC Graduate Programme; SPC Generalist, Specialist and ESG:
Generalist
Here you’ll have the opportunity to move around and develop a breadth of skills and experiences to help you progress your career. You’ll complete rotations across several of our SPC sub-divisions, which include:
- Controls, Capabilities & Frameworks
- Competition
- Consumer Investments
- Cross-Cutting Policy & Strategy
- Insurance
- Retail Banking
- Payments & Digital Assets
- Consumer Finance
Specialist
Here you’ll have the opportunity to join our Specialist Directorate where the departments include; Financial Crime, Financial Resilience, Resolution Strategy Operations & CASS, Resolution Insolvency, Technology Resilience & Cyber and the Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision (OPBAS).
You could see yourself within one of our teams who lead on specialisms that cross the spectrum of the c.60 thousand regulated firms and, within OPBAS, 25 professional body supervisors that supervise thousands more professional firms. The work involves bringing respective intelligence and perspectives on the firms we regulate to provide a holistic view that can help mitigate root causes and one day help predict the next issue on a firm.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
In addition, there is an opportunity for you to join our ESG Division, which sits at the heart of our work developing and coordinating the delivery of our strategy and commitments in the ESG space. This spans our roles as both a regulator and an operating entity, including thinking through how we make the transition to net zero as an organisation.
It also involves work on policy and strategy development. embedding ESG thinking across the organisation, contributing to government, industry and international initiatives on ESG, and working on firm culture, market intelligence and external engagement.
Learning & Development
As a graduate in Supervision, Policy and Competition, you’ll have the opportunity to study towards an Apprenticeship, Professional Qualification or enrol on a development pathway relevant to your graduate programme. We will also give you the support you need to develop your career at the FCA.
What we look for
Our staff have diverse backgrounds, and no specific degree stands out as being essential for the Generalist stream. The Specialist stream is aimed at those with a STEM or Economics background.
You’ll learn a lot on the job, so we don’t expect you to have a detailed regulatory knowledge, however, you should have an interest in governance. You’ll also need to be strategically minded, great at building strong relationships at all levels and be able to influence and persuade.
What we offer
We’re committed to making the FCA a great place to work. We do this by:
- providing a rewarding environment, recognising that our people are motivated by meaningful work
- maintaining a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, allowing people to develop and progress without barriers
- looking after the well-being of our people, ensuring that they are safe and well and appropriately cared for
- promoting an environment in which people are valued and respected
Beyond this, we offer all our graduates a competitive range of benefits, including:
- Base salary of £36,000
- Flexible working options
- Private health care
- Career and family leave
- Non-contributory pension
- Charity and volunteering initiatives
- Minimum of 25 days’ holiday
- Sports and social clubs
- Subsidised on-site fitness centre (London only)
- Free eye tests
- Subsidised restaurant
- Interest-free season ticket loans.
Please Note
- We only accept ONE application per person for our 2023 programmes, therefore, please apply to your first-choice programme. Any additional applications will not be progressed.
- For the 2023 Supervision, Policy & Competition Graduate Programme, submit your online application by Sunday 11th December 2022. However, we recruit on a rolling basis and therefore encourage early applications.
- Applicants must have obtained or be on track to achieve a minimum 2:1 degree from any university.
- Applicants for the 2023 graduate programmes must have graduated or be in their final year of study.