From 1 June 2021, the FCA will no longer be accepting Change of Legal Status applications. Instead, if you are thinking of changing your firm’s legal status, you will need to submit a New Authorisation application*. You will also need to cancel the previous entity’s permissions.

When submitting an application for the new legal entity, you will need to sign a Deed Poll declaration. This requires your firm to deal with any complaints from existing customers in the same way that it would customers of your new legal entity. We have this requirement to prevent firms leaving behind their obligations to their customers by changing their legal entity.

Why is this changing?

A review of how the FCA assesses firms changing their legal status showed it is faster and more efficient for firms to submit new applications through the Connect system. It was found that, where firms were required to submit a change in legal status application, these were often incomplete, causing delays in the assessment process. The changes are intended to improve the process for firms changing legal status, minimising any delays to the assessment process.

Customers

If you have any ongoing contractual agreements with your customers, you must contact them and agree either to amend their existing contracts or to agree new contracts to take into account the change in your firm’s legal entity.

Otherwise you should let your customers know about the change in the legal entity as and when you next deal with them.

Table of firm types

*Depending on the legal structure of the previous entity and the new entity, you will need to submit either a New Authorisation application or a SUP 15 notification.