A 7,300% rise in finfluencer actions tells you about 2023, not 2025

Seventy-three times what?

Seventy-three times over. That is what a 7,300 per cent increase means: whatever the Financial Conduct Authority — the United Kingdom’s main regulator of banks, insurers, investment firms and the way financial products are sold — was doing about unlawful investment promotions on social media in 2023, it did seventy-three times as much of it in 2025.

The figure is arresting. On its own it is also close to uninformative, because the one number that would let a reader judge it is the number nobody quotes: the base. If the regulator took ten actions in 2023, it took seven hundred and thirty in 2025. If it took two hundred, it took nearly fifteen thousand. Those are not the same regulator and they are not the same market. Growth from a standing start is the easiest statistic in enforcement to generate and the hardest to interpret, and it is generated most easily by whoever started with the least.

The rule underneath

The law here is old and the medium is new. In Britain it is an offence to invite the public into investment activity unless you are authorised to do so, or unless an authorised firm has signed off your words. The rule was written for brochures and newspaper advertisements, where the person doing the inviting had an office, a compliance function and something to lose. It now applies, unchanged in principle, to a thirty-second video made on a phone by someone with four hundred thousand followers and an affiliate link.

So the regulator’s recent work has been less about inventing a prohibition than about asserting that an existing one reaches a new place. That is a legitimate and necessary thing to do. It is also precisely the situation in which a growth rate flatters: when you begin enforcing in a space you were barely present in, any sustained effort produces a number with two or three zeros on the end.

What the word “action” is carrying

“Action” is a container. It can hold an email to a platform asking that a post be removed. It can hold a warning letter. It can hold an interview under caution, a restriction on an account, or a criminal charge. These differ by orders of magnitude in cost, in legal weight and in what they do to the person on the receiving end.

Any single total that sums them will be dominated by the cheapest item in the box, because cheap tools scale and expensive ones do not. That is not sharp practice; it is arithmetic. But it means a seventy-three-fold rise is most readily explained by a regulator industrialising its least costly intervention — and we cannot tell from the published figure whether that is what happened. That is the complaint. The regulator has the breakdown. It chose to lead with the ratio.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Deterrence against a diffuse, lightly capitalised population works only if the consequence outlasts the post. Deleting a video costs the poster the minutes required to upload it again, possibly under a new handle. Meanwhile the harm, if there is harm, has already largely occurred: an audience arrives while the content is live, not after it comes down. So the measures that would actually tell you something are not totals at all. They are the share of unlawful promotions the regulator reaches rather than the count it reaches; the time between a report and a removal; and the proportion of actioned accounts that reappear.

None of those are exotic. They are the ordinary vocabulary of operational performance. The Bank of England ran a sector-wide simulation of a global cloud outage this week and framed the output as what firms are now expected to do differently. That is outcome language. A growth rate is not.

The case against this argument

The strongest defence runs as follows. This is a new enforcement frontier; a regulator entering it must start from nothing, and saying so honestly produces exactly this kind of ratio. Cheap tools are the correct tools when the offending population is large and individually small — chasing each poster through the criminal courts would mean reaching a dozen people a year. Prosecutions take years, so a regulator that reported only convictions would report nothing for a long time and look asleep while people were being harmed. And a loud public number is itself part of the deterrent: it tells a diffuse group of posters that the odds have changed.

All of that is true, and none of it argues against publishing the base and the mix alongside. If the composition is defensible, disclosure costs nothing and buys credibility. If it is not, the audience most in need of deterring — posters who can observe for themselves whether removed accounts come back — will work it out faster than any press release. Deterrence that rests on a statistic its targets can falsify from their own feed is advertising, not enforcement.

The part that is genuinely good

Asserting that an authorisation rule reaches social media at all was a real choice, and the right one. The alternative was a regime where the same pitch is policed in a brochure and unpoliced in a video, which is not a regime. The criticism here is of the scorecard, not the campaign.