The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has hiked the fees health and protection insurance advice firms must pay when applying to be regulated for the first time.
Health and protection insurance advice firms seeking to be regulated by the FCA for the first time from 24 January will have to pay £2,500 – up from the previous standard charge of £1,500.
There are 10 fee bands with health and protection insurance advisers and other general insurance distributors in block four along with mortgage advisers and corporate finance advisers.
Application fees range from £250 up to £200,000 depending on the business and permissions being applied for.
These figures will be reassessed every year in line with the increase or decrease in the costs of ongoing regulatory activities, the FCA added.
The regulator consulted on the proposals in late 2020 noting that the structure had not changed since its predecessor the Financial Services Authority.
The FCA argued that its costs for authorising firms had increased over that time but the contribution from these firms had not, which meant existing authorised firms were taking on more of the burden.
“We proposed to revalorise our application fees to take account of inflation and to condense more than 80 separate fees into 10 standard pricing categories,” the FCA said in its PS 22/1 policy statement announcing the changes.
“We estimated that the overall impact of our proposals would raise the contribution of applicants towards the cost of processing their applications from about a third to about two-thirds, reducing the balance we need to recover from existing firms.
“We felt this was a fairer apportionment in principle, though we warned that there would not be a large practical impact on existing fee-payers,” it added.
The FCA grouped the 83 charges into the 10 categories by first revaluing them in line with inflation from the date of their introduction and then moving them up or down to the nearest pricing category.
Overall, 49 charges increased, 23 stayed the same and 11 were reduced.