Every mortgage broker who operates in the UK market is subject to FCA regulation — and that regulation extends to your website. Whether you're an independent broker in Birmingham, Edinburgh, or anywhere across the UK, many brokers are unaware of exactly what's required, and most generic web agencies have never thought about financial promotion rules at all.
The FCA Authorisation Statement
This is the most basic requirement and the one most often missed. Every page of your website must clearly display that your firm is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, along with your FCA registration number. The statement typically goes in the footer.
The exact wording required: "[Firm Name] is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. FCA Registration Number: XXXXXX." It must be legible — not 8pt grey text that nobody can read.
ASIC registration number in Australia, CFPB/state regulator disclosure in the USA, Central Bank of Ireland authorisation in Ireland. The principle is the same: your regulatory status must be clearly visible.
Financial Promotion Rules
Under FSMA 2000 and the FCA's MCOB sourcebook, all financial promotions must be fair, clear, and not misleading. This applies directly to the copy on your website — including your homepage headline, your service descriptions, and any claims you make about rates or outcomes.
Common compliance failures on broker sites include: claiming to "guarantee" mortgage approvals, quoting specific rates without adequate context, making comparative claims against high-street banks without substantiation, and using testimonials that imply guaranteed outcomes.
GDPR-Compliant Lead Capture
Any form on your site that collects personal data — contact forms, callback request forms, newsletter signups — must include explicit consent language, a clear statement of how data will be used, and a link to your privacy policy. Pre-ticked consent boxes are not compliant.
Cookie Consent
Under UK GDPR and PECR, you must obtain informed consent before setting non-essential cookies. This means a cookie banner that genuinely allows visitors to decline — not a banner that only has an "Accept" button, or one that sets cookies before the visitor makes a choice.
What we include in every build
At Senja Studio, every site we build includes: the FCA authorisation statement in the footer of every page, compliant disclaimer copy reviewed against MCOB requirements, GDPR-compliant lead forms with explicit consent language, a properly implemented cookie consent banner, and a privacy policy covering all data collection on the site.
We review all copy for financial promotion compliance before any site goes live. If a client wants to make a claim that could create a compliance issue, we flag it and rewrite the copy to be compliant before launch.
Social media and third-party content count too
The financial promotion rules do not stop at your homepage. A LinkedIn post promoting your services, a Facebook advert, a testimonial you reshare and a page a marketing agency wrote for you are all promotions. The firm is responsible for them whether or not the firm wrote them. This is where brokers most often get caught out, because the website gets reviewed carefully and everything else gets posted in a hurry.
Where broker sites most often slip
In practice the same handful of issues recur. Rate figures left on a page months after they stopped being available. A testimonial that implies a guaranteed outcome — "they got me approved when nobody else would" reads as a promise, whether or not it was meant as one. Comparative claims against high street lenders with nothing on file to back them. An authorisation statement in 8pt grey on a light grey footer, technically present and practically invisible. And appointed representatives displaying their own name without naming the principal firm.
Keeping a record is part of the requirement
Compliance is not only about what the page says today. You are expected to be able to show what it said when it was published and who signed it off. A dated record of each version of your promotional copy, kept somewhere you can actually retrieve it, turns a difficult conversation into a short one.
In practice this is straightforward: keep a PDF of each significant version of your key pages with the date and the reviewer's name. It takes minutes and it is the difference between answering a question and reconstructing a year of edits from memory.
A note on what this article is
This is general guidance on website content, written by a studio that builds broker sites — not compliance advice, and not a substitute for it. Senja Studio is not authorised or regulated by the FCA. Confirm your own obligations with your compliance officer or your network before you publish. What we can tell you is what we build in as standard and what we flag before a site goes live.