CONC 3 Has Been a Museum Piece for Years. The FCA Finally Noticed.

This goes beyond the usual “tidying up exercises” that CONC goes through every so often. This is the FCA looking at a rulebook that has accreted layer upon layer of prescriptive requirements since the Consumer Credit Act 1974, and finally doing something about it.

What CONC 3 Currently Is

CONC 3 is the FCA’s sourcebook chapter governing financial promotions for consumer credit products. It tells firms how to present credit information: what must be included, in what order, in what prominence, with what warnings.

At its best, it provides clarity. A firm can look at a draft promotion, check it against the checklist, and know whether it complies. That is not nothing. Compliance teams, legal teams, and creative agencies have built workflows around CONC 3’s prescriptive requirements because prescription, whatever its flaws, is at least legible.

The problem is that CONC 3 was written for a different era. It was built around newspaper ads and TV commercials. It was not built for short-form video, for in-app notifications, for checkout flows that must communicate credit costs in three lines on a mobile screen. The rules have been stretched into contexts they were never designed for, and the results are often unsatisfactory: technically compliant promotions that fail to actually communicate what credit costs.

What the FCA Is Proposing

The core of CP26/15 is a shift from prescription to outcome. Rather than telling firms exactly what to include and how to present it, the FCA wants to give firms more flexibility to design communications that meet the outcome of ensuring consumers genuinely understand what they are signing up for.

This is directly aligned with Consumer Duty. The Duty requires firms to demonstrate good outcomes for consumers, not that they ticked a box. A Consumer Duty-world cannot also be a world where ticking the CONC 3 box discharges the firm’s obligations. The FCA has noticed the inconsistency and is resolving it.

Some specific proposals are worth highlighting:

The APR section is the most substantively complex part of the consultation. The Representative APR has long been criticised as a metric that confuses more than it clarifies: a rate that only 51% of consumers need to be offered does not obviously represent the typical consumer’s experience. The FCA explores several options for reform, including clearer explanation of what the Representative APR actually means. That last option, however, raises a practical question that the consultation does not fully answer: requiring firms to “better explain” the Representative APR in every promotion sounds sensible in principle, but the mechanics of doing it in a banner ad or a social post are considerably harder than they sound.

The proposed removal of CONC 3.6, the prescriptive mandated disclaimers section, is cleaner. The FCA’s reasoning is sound: mandated disclaimers made sense when the alternative was silence, but in a Consumer Duty world, they create a false floor. A firm that has included the required disclaimer has not necessarily ensured the consumer understood the cost. The Duty asks for more, and CONC 3.6 was always a proxy for the thing the regulator actually cares about.

Interestingly, CONC 3.3, the clear, fair and not misleading requirement, looks likely to survive largely intact, despite being broadly duplicated by Consumer Duty. The FCA’s view appears to be that explicit rules matter even when general principles cover the same ground, because explicit rules are easier to enforce.

The Disclosure Trade-Off

Alongside the consultation, the FCA published a research note on the disclosure trade-off between flexibility and standardisation. It is worth reading alongside CP26/15 because it explains the FCA’s own uncertainty.

The research shows that standardised disclosure formats help consumers compare products across providers but may not communicate effectively in all contexts. Flexible disclosure allows firms to adapt to their specific channels and consumers but creates inconsistency across the market. The FCA does not have a clean answer to this tension. It is, in effect, asking the industry to help it find one.

That transparency about the problem is useful. The consultation period is an opportunity to engage with real data: firms that can demonstrate what works, in which channels, for which consumers, will have a genuine impact on how these rules end up.

What Firms Should Do Now

The consultation closes in summer 2026. The temptation, as with many FCA consultations, is to wait and see what emerges. That would be a massive missed opportunity if you’re in consumer credit.

The firms that respond providing evidence, case studies, data on what disclosures actually land with consumers etc, will be the ones that shape what CONC 3 looks like in its next iteration. The FCA has explicitly said it wants that input. This is a rare moment where the outcome is genuinely open.

For compliance teams, the more immediate task is to start mapping your existing consumer credit promotions against the proposed outcomes framework. If your current CONC 3 compliance is largely box-ticking, you have advance notice that the box is going away. Start building the evidence base for what good outcomes actually look like in your specific context before the rules require you to demonstrate it.

CONC 3 has needed a rewrite for a long time. The FCA is finally attempting one. Whether it lands well will depend partly on what firms do in the next few months.

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