FCA “Mills Review”: How AI Could Reshape UK Retail Financial Services by 2030

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has launched the Mills Review, a call for input on how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could reshape retail financial services for consumers, firms, markets, and regulators by 2030 and beyond. The review is framed as an evidence-led look at both the opportunities and the risks of faster AI adoption, recognising AI is already embedded in areas such as fraud detection, credit decisioning and customer support, and that publicly available generative AI has accelerated consumer and industry uptake.

In its introduction, Sheldon Mills explains that the FCA does not plan to introduce extra AI-specific regulation, instead relying on existing, outcomes-focused frameworks while adapting how they are applied as AI changes the pace, scale and nature of financial services. Alongside this, the FCA describes practical support for responsible innovation, including its Supercharged Sandbox (supported by NVIDIA) and a new AI Live Testing service to help firms test safely, build trust and reduce risk.

The Mills Review sets out four interrelated themes for feedback:

1. How AI technology may evolve, including more autonomous and “agentic” systems.
2. How AI may change markets and firms, including competition, market structure, and the shifting role of platforms and data.
3. How consumer experiences and outcomes may change, including a future where people increasingly interact through AI-mediated interfaces or personal financial “agents” that manage day-to-day money decisions—alongside risks such as bias, exclusion, opaque outcomes, misleading or “hallucinatory” advice, reduced consumer agency and financial literacy, and more sophisticated AI-enabled fraud and identity abuse.
4. How regulation may need to adapt while remaining outcomes-based—supporting innovation while managing emerging consumer protection, operational resilience and financial crime challenges.

Overall, the review positions AI as a major opportunity to improve consumer outcomes and strengthen competitiveness, while being clear that the same technologies can amplify harms and create new vulnerabilities if governance, accountability and protections do not keep pace.

Source: Review into the long-term impact of AI on retail financial services (The Mills Review) | FCA