If a supplier has told you that FCA rules require your dealership to record its sales calls, they were probably talking about SYSC 10A. And for almost every UK dealership, that rule does not apply to you.
That is worth knowing before you sign anything, because the pitch and the regulation are not the same thing. There is a real obligation sitting on your finance calls, it is just not this one, and the difference changes what you should be doing about it.
The short answer
SYSC 10A is the FCA's taping rule. It applies to firms doing investment business in financial instruments. A dealership introducing a customer to a finance product is doing credit broking, which is a different regulated activity under a different part of the Handbook. Different rulebook, different obligations.
So if you are a franchised or independent dealer arranging PCP or HP for customers, the taping rule almost certainly does not reach you. What does reach you is Consumer Duty and the consumer credit rules, and those ask for something subtly different: not that you record, but that you can evidence what happened.
What SYSC 10A actually covers
The scope is set out in SYSC 10A of the FCA Handbook, and it is narrower than most people assume. The chapter applies to a specific list of firm types:
- MiFID investment firms
- Full-scope UK AIFMs
- UCITS management companies
- Third country investment firms
- Energy and oil market activity firms
- OPS firms
And it bites on a specific set of activities: arranging deals in investments, dealing in investments as agent or principal, and managing investments. The common thread is financial instruments. Shares, bonds, derivatives, that world.
When one of those firms takes a call that is intended to result in a transaction, the call has to be recorded and kept. That is the rule people are describing when they say the FCA makes you tape calls. It is a real rule with real teeth, and it was written for a part of the industry your dealership does not operate in.
Why a dealership sits outside it
A motor dealer arranging finance is acting as a credit broker. You are introducing a customer to a lender for a regulated credit agreement, and that activity is governed by CONC, the consumer credit sourcebook. You are not dealing in financial instruments, and a PCP agreement is not a financial instrument in the sense SYSC 10A means.
The Handbook is explicit on this point. Consumer credit brokers that do not fall into one of the listed firm categories sit outside SYSC 10A's scope. That is not a loophole or an interpretation, it is how the chapter is drafted.
Here is where the confusion comes from. The people selling call recording are usually selling to the whole FCA-regulated market, and a large part of that market genuinely is caught by SYSC 10A. Wealth managers, brokers, advisers doing MiFID business. The marketing gets written once and pointed at everyone, and by the time it reaches a dealer principal the caveats have fallen off. So you get told the FCA requires recording, which is true for someone, just not for you.
The one exception worth checking
There is a version of this where the answer changes, and it is worth ruling out rather than assuming.
If your group contains an entity that carries on genuine MiFID investment business, that entity is in scope even if the dealerships around it are not. Larger groups with a separate financial services arm are where this occasionally turns up. It is not common in motor retail, but if your group structure has anything unusual in it, the question is worth putting to whoever handles your permissions rather than assumed away.
For a single site or a straightforward multi-site dealer group doing credit broking and insurance distribution, the answer stays no.
What to ask a supplier who says it applies
If someone is telling you the FCA requires your dealership to record calls, four questions will settle it quickly.
- Which rule are you referring to? If the answer is SYSC 10A, you now know the scope question to put back to them.
- Which of the listed firm types is my dealership? Credit broking is not on that list. There is rarely a good answer to this one.
- Are you describing a rule, or a way of evidencing Consumer Duty? Both are legitimate conversations. They are just not the same conversation, and the second one is the honest version.
- Can I retrieve one specific finance call by deal reference? This is the question that actually matters, and it is the one most recording setups answer badly.
None of this means you should not buy call recording. It means you should buy it for the reason that holds up, and judge it on whether it solves the problem you genuinely have.
What actually binds your finance calls
This is the part that matters, and it is why the answer being no does not mean you can stop thinking about it.
CONC 4.5.3R requires that before a customer enters a regulated credit agreement, someone explains the key features adequately enough for them to make an informed decision. The rule is about the explanation happening. It does not tell you to record it.
Then Consumer Duty sits on top, and this is where it gets sharper. Principle 12 and PRIN 2A do not ask you to have a policy saying customers understand what they signed. They ask you to monitor and evidence the outcomes your customers actually got. Evidence is the operative word. A policy document is not evidence that a particular conversation on a particular Saturday went the way it should have.
And then there is history. PS26/3 put a redress scheme over agreements written between 2007 and 2024. Dealers are not directly liable under that scheme, but lenders assessing those agreements will be reconstructing what was said at the point of sale, and they will ask the dealer who introduced the finance what evidence exists. If your answer is a CRM note and a salesperson who left two years ago, that is a weak position to be in.
So the obligation is not “record your calls”. The obligation is “be able to show what happened”. Recording is simply the most practical way anyone has found to do that, which is a different and more honest argument than the one you were probably given. For the full picture on the telecoms and data protection side, we covered the UK call recording laws in detail separately.
So should you record anyway?
Probably yes, but go in with the right reason, because the reason determines what you actually need.
If you were recording to satisfy SYSC 10A, you would need retention and retrieval built to that rule's specification. You are not, so you do not. What you need instead is the ability to answer a question like “show me that this customer had commission explained to them” without a three-week search through an archive.
That is a retrieval problem more than a recording problem. Plenty of dealerships already record everything and still cannot produce a specific finance conversation on request, which leaves them with all of the storage cost and none of the protection. Being able to find the call is the part that counts, and it is what FCA compliance monitoring for dealerships is really for.
Worth saying plainly, since the whole point of this piece is not overstating things: no software makes you compliant. Your obligations stay yours. What tooling can do is make the evidence retrievable when somebody asks, and mean somebody has actually listened to more than a handful of your calls this quarter. See how axleo automates compliance monitoring across every call.