Today, we have responded to the Financial Regulators Complaints Commissioner's Final Report into complaints from those affected by the collapse of Premier FX Limited in 2018.
The failure of Premier FX[1] caused serious worry for people who had entrusted it with their money.
We have considered the Commissioner’s recommendations carefully. While we accept many of these, we do not believe we should pay compensation to Premier FX’s customers beyond the payments we have made for delays in the handling of people’s complaints.
The direct cause of Premier FX’s collapse were the decisions of the firm and its sole director. Our work, dedicating over 12,000 hours to our successful enforcement investigations, ensured the 167 customers with accepted claims received back all the money they had paid to Premier FX, with Barclays, the firm’s banker, agreeing a voluntary payment of £10,076,943.75[2].
Additionally, while we recognise that there are things we could have done better in our regulation of Premier FX, it is not clear that a different approach could have avoided people’s losses or seen their money returned sooner.
Today we reiterate our sincere apology to those affected by the failure of Premier FX. We have sought to learn lessons from this episode, including taking a more assertive approach to the authorisation and supervision of payment firms.
We will be writing to the complainants to explain what steps have been taken to strengthen our regulatory processes and improvements made to our Register.