The Mills Review is the FCA's report on how AI could reshape retail financial services by 2030 and beyond. Published on 6 July 2026 and led by executive director Sheldon Mills at the request of the FCA Board, it concludes that the sector is moving from human-led services towards AI-enabled, continuous and delegated ones, and it makes seven priority recommendations for how the regulator should respond. Every one of those recommendations is addressed to the FCA itself, so nothing in the review changes a firm's obligations today. The direction it sets will shape how financial promotions are made, read and supervised for the rest of the decade.
What is the Mills Review?
The FCA Board commissioned the review to examine what advances in AI, and agentic AI in particular, could do to retail financial services. The conclusions rest on evidence rather than prediction alone: an engagement paper that ran through early 2026 gathered input from firms, trade bodies, consumer groups and technology providers, and the FCA commissioned a survey of more than 5,000 UK consumers alongside focus groups and a comparison of international approaches to AI regulation.
The central finding is a shift in who acts. In the market the review describes, AI recommends actions, initiates transactions and executes decisions within agreed parameters, for firms and for consumers. The review calls this agentic finance. Consumers are closer to it than most firms assume: the FCA's research found 1 in 5 UK adults are already open to AI making financial decisions for them.
What are the seven recommendations?
The review puts seven priorities to the FCA Board:
- Secure and adapt the regulatory perimeter, so it stays clear what falls inside regulation as AI systems begin to act on behalf of firms and consumers.
- Strengthen system-wide coordination and oversight across regulators and market infrastructure.
- Monitor the transition to autonomous models and adapt regulatory frameworks as it happens.
- Scale up the FCA's AI Lab to support model and system innovation in financial services.
- Enable the foundations for agentic finance.
- Build and adopt an AI-enabled agentic supervisory model, meaning the FCA itself supervises with AI.
- Develop a trusted public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service for consumers.
Two of these deserve particular attention from anyone who writes, approves or signs off financial promotions: the perimeter work in recommendation one, and the AI-enabled supervisor in recommendation six.
What does the Mills Review mean for financial promotions?
The financial promotions regime assumes a human reads the promotion. Risk warnings, prominence, balance between benefit and risk: all of it is judged on what a person sees on the page. An agent-led journey breaks that assumption. When a consumer's AI assistant reads fifty product pages and returns a three-line comparison, the prominence of your risk warning is decided inside someone else's model, and the summary the consumer acts on is a communication nobody at your firm drafted, reviewed or approved.
Whether that summary is itself a financial promotion, and who answers for it, is precisely the question the perimeter recommendation asks the FCA to resolve. Firms will not get to wait for the answer before it matters commercially, because consumers are adopting the assistants first and the rules second.
Recommendation six runs the other way. A supervisor with its own AI agents can read the market at a scale no human team could, and the FCA has been assembling the infrastructure for exactly that. Its chief executive said in June that legislation will never keep up with AI and supervision will fill the gap, a shift we covered at the time, and the regulator has since opened its Handbook through an API so that rules can be read by machines. Put those pieces together and the plausible end state is a regulator able to check promotions against a machine-readable rulebook continuously, rather than through periodic sweeps.
Both futures reward the same asset: the decision record. When an agent misquotes your product, the question is what you actually published and approved. When an AI-enabled supervisor queries a promotion, the question is what evidence sat behind the claim and who signed it off. A firm that can answer from a record built at the moment of approval is in a different position from one reconstructing the story afterwards.
What should compliance and marketing teams do now?
Three moves follow from the review, and none of them requires waiting for the FCA to act on its recommendations.
Make evidencing automatic. The FCA has separately confirmed it will publish AI audit-trail and explainability guidance by the end of 2026. A financial promotions audit trail that captures the claim, the evidence, the audience, the reasoning and the sign-off at the point of decision is the preparation that guidance will assume.
Learn what machines say about you. Ask the major AI assistants what they tell consumers about your products. The answers are already shaping decisions, and any gap between what an assistant says and what your approved promotions say is a preview of the perimeter problem arriving at your firm specifically.
Treat rules as data. An agent-led market runs on machine-readable rules, and the Handbook API means the UK rulebook already is. If your review process still moves at the speed of a person checking a PDF, the gap between your checks and the market the Mills Review describes widens every quarter. Adclear, agentic compliance software for financial promotions, reviews regulated marketing against a continuously updated rulebook before it goes live and produces the regulator-ready record of every decision as a by-product.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote the Mills Review?
FCA executive director Sheldon Mills led the review at the request of the FCA Board. It was published on 6 July 2026 under the full title "AI and the future of retail financial services".
Does the Mills Review create new rules for firms?
All seven recommendations are addressed to the FCA Board, and firms' obligations remain as they were. The review shapes how the regulator plans to evolve, and the practical effects for firms arrive through the workstreams that follow it.
What is agentic finance?
Agentic finance describes a market in which AI systems recommend actions, initiate transactions and execute financial decisions within parameters a firm or consumer has agreed, rather than simply assisting a human who acts.
Where can I read the Mills Review?
The FCA published the full review and its supporting consumer research at fca.org.uk.
If the market the Mills Review describes arrives on anything like its 2030 timeline, the firms comfortable in it will be the ones whose approval and evidencing already run at machine speed. To see what that looks like on your own promotions, book a product tour.
Adclear is automated marketing-compliance software serving regulated firms in the UK, US and other markets. Customers retain final compliance decisions and sign-off authority. This article is educational and not regulatory advice.
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