Money, in brief

Britain's financial regulator, the FCA, says it is worried that customers' money may not always be safe if a payments firm fails. [1]

Payment and electronic-money firms must hold customer money separately from their own, in an account at a bank. The rule is called safeguarding. [2][7]

Electronic-money firms held about 26bn pounds of safeguarded customer money in 2024, up from 11bn pounds in 2021. [1]

Payment firms held an estimated 6bn pounds a day in 2024. [1]

The compensation scheme that covers money in a bank account does not cover payment services or electronic money at all. [2][3][4][5]

Three firms went into a special kind of administration between October 2025 and June 2026: Currency Matters, Halo Financial and Monevium. [4][5][6]

A fourth, Euro Exchange Securities, was put into the same process by the High Court after the regulator stopped it trading. The FCA called it its first case of the kind. [3]

That special administration exists to do one extra job. The administrators must return customer money as soon as it reasonably can be returned. [4][5][6]

In the United States a rule called 15c3-3 makes a stockbroker keep client assets apart from its own, so they can be handed back quickly if the broker closes. [8]

Where nobody wrote such a rule, the money is simply the company's. A gift card is money paid up front for shopping nobody has done yet. [15]

Bankrate found 43% of US adults holding an unused gift card worth $244 on average, and 12% had a shop close before they spent the balance. [14]

New FCA safeguarding rules came into force in May 2026, and the regulator says it expects more failed audits in the short term as firms adjust. [1]

Why it matters. Watch the safeguarding audits the FCA says are coming, because the regulator has already warned that more of them will come back adverse as the new rules bite. [1]

A BBC investigation says Tony Singh, who runs the letting agency Morgan, Payne & Knightly in Birmingham, Telford and Wolverhampton, did not return deposits to more than 100 tenants. Under UK law an agent must put a tenant's deposit into a government-registered scheme, which holds it apart from the agent's own money. Raman Kaur is still waiting for 900 pounds and found hers had never been registered. Eight county court judgments have been made against the company and against Singh, who has not responded to the BBC. [9]

Why it matters. The deposit is the largest lump of cash most renters ever hand to a stranger. Without registration a tenant is left chasing a company through a county court, alongside everyone else it owes.

Guernsey's Committee for Housing has decided not to go ahead with a government-regulated deposit scheme for private rentals, saying it hopes the lettings industry will build one instead. Guernsey Deposits, an organisation set up to run an industry scheme, said its version was ready to launch but that the island's rules made it commercially unviable. One renter, Kristyna Hudson, said it took about a year to get her deposit back after the agency Sarnia Estate Agents went bust. [10]

Why it matters. It is the same fork as the lead story, on a small island. With no scheme, a deposit sits in the agent's own account and the renter waits behind everybody else.

Spirit Airlines, a US budget carrier, began winding down after talks with the Trump administration over a $500m rescue collapsed. It cancelled every flight and told passengers not to go to the airport. Spirit said it would automatically refund tickets bought with a credit or debit card, back to the card they were paid with. A bankruptcy court will decide what happens to bookings made with vouchers, credit or airline points. [11][12] It had filed for bankruptcy protection twice, and rising fuel costs had been expected to push it to close for good. [13]

Why it matters. Two customers of the same airline get two different answers, and the only difference is how they paid. One refund runs through the card company; the other joins the queue of people the airline owes.

Bankrate's survey found 43% of US adults holding at least one unused gift card, gift voucher or store credit, worth $244 each on average, up from $187 in 2023. In households earning $100,000 or more the share rises to 55%, at an average of $348. About 34% have lost gift-card money altogether: 20% let a card expire, 17% lost the card, and 12% had the shop go out of business before they spent it. A gift card is money paid up front for shopping not yet done. [14][15]

Why it matters. Those shoppers had paid a shop that later closed, and no rule required the shop to keep their money apart. Once it shut, the balance became a claim against a company with nothing left.

In the United States, life and health insurers that go under are handled by state guaranty associations, which step in to meet policyholder claims. Insurers must also hold reserves set by state law, and many buy reinsurance, which is insurance for insurance companies, to spread the risk of a very large loss. The National Organization of Life and Health Insurance Guaranty Associations says no life insurance company has filed for bankruptcy since the 2008 financial crisis. [16]

Why it matters. This is a third way of protecting money already handed over: not separation, and not a national scheme, but an industry made to cover its own failures. Which of the three a customer gets depends on what they bought.

The FCA's perimeter report sets out the edges of what it regulates. It says financial spread betting sits inside its remit but sports spread betting does not, because those bets turn on sporting or political results rather than investments. The regulator warns that people should not assume sports or other non-financial betting products are covered by financial compensation schemes, and it has asked the UK Treasury to say clearly where the boundary should sit. [18]

Why it matters. A product can look financial, be sold online next to financial ones, and carry none of the protections. The regulator is saying so in public because it cannot close the gap itself.

The FCA published how often it used its skilled person power in 2025/26. It ordered 31 reviews, in which an outside firm is sent into a regulated company to examine its systems and report back. The regulator picked the reviewer itself in 5 cases and the company picked its own in the other 26. Insurance drew the most reviews with 7, wholesale sell-side firms 6, and payments and digital assets 3. Eleven different firms carried out the work. [17]

Why it matters. It is a rough gauge of where a regulator thinks the risk sits. Three of the thirty-one landed on payments, the sector whose customers have no compensation scheme behind them.

Staff at the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a no-action letter saying they would not recommend enforcement against registered investment advisers who keep crypto assets with state trust companies. Commissioner Hester Peirce set out the decision in a statement titled Out of the Gray Zone. Custody rules exist so that a manager cannot mix client assets with its own, and the letter settles which institutions count as a proper place to keep them. [19]

Why it matters. It is the lead story's question asked about a different asset. Until now, advisers holding crypto for clients could not be sure the company keeping it was one the rules allow.

Rongmala, 57, rented out her south London maisonette after her disabilities meant she could no longer live alone. Her tenant stopped paying last year. She served an eviction notice and started court proceedings, and the arrears are now around 15,000 pounds while the tenant stays put. Court delays are holding up the removal. England's Renters' Rights Act, in force since 1 May, bans no-fault evictions, and some landlords say waits like hers will get longer. [20]

Why it matters. Money owed is not money held. She is a creditor of her own tenant, and the only route to it runs through a court list that is already full.

Under the Renters' Rights Act, a tenancy in England can no longer be fixed for 12 or 24 months. Every private tenancy becomes periodic, meaning it rolls on until somebody ends it, and a tenant who wants to leave gives two months' notice. Existing tenants do not have to sign anything, because the change happens by itself. Scotland has had rolling tenancies since 2017, while Wales and Northern Ireland still allow fixed terms. Private renting is now 19% of households in England. [42][43]

Why it matters. It moves the power to end a tenancy towards whoever wants to go. A landlord can still evict, but now has to name a reason.

Rightmove data shared with the BBC shows renter searches filtered for pet-friendly properties fell 54% in May and 52% in June against the same months a year earlier. Pets are still the most searched-for feature overall, but the gap is narrowing. England's new rules stop a landlord using a blanket no-pets clause. A landlord can still refuse where another tenant is allergic, the property is too small, the animal is illegal, or a freeholder forbids pets. [21]

Why it matters. A search filter disappears when the thing it filtered for becomes the default. Letting agents say some tenants now mention a pet only after signing.

Jersey's Residential Tenancy Law has changed, bringing in firmer rules on notice periods, tenancy types and rent increases. A new Rent Tribunal can hear a tenant's challenge to a proposed rise, and can approve it, change it or reject it. The law also caps how much rent can go up. Priya Jobanputra, a property lawyer at the firm Le Gallais and Luce, said it gives landlords a clearer structure for ending a lease where a tenant has damaged a property or behaved badly. [22]

Why it matters. Jersey, Guernsey and England have all rewritten their renting rules within a year, in three different directions. A renter's protection now depends on which island they are standing on.

Guernsey's Housing Committee wants minimum requirements for private rentals, starting with whether a written tenancy agreement exists at all and what it has to contain. Proposals are due to go to the island's parliament by the end of the year. Charlie Cox, chief executive of the charity At Home In Guernsey, called the move positive and said people who feel secure make better tenants. Housing President Steve Williams said the island did not want to put landlords off or add bureaucracy. [23]

Why it matters. Guernsey is starting the process England has just finished. The same committee has dropped a deposit scheme, so one protection is arriving while another is withdrawn.

In Scotland, councils will be able to ask the Scottish government for permission to cap private rents in parts of their area, which is expected from spring 2027. Temporary Scottish controls introduced in October 2022 expired in spring 2025. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has pressed for a cap. Average monthly rent in London reached 2,268 pounds in December 2025, the highest in the UK. Many economists say controls reduce the number of homes offered for rent. [24]

Why it matters. Berlin's brief cap is the case both sides cite, and one renter there described a three-month search for a room. Price and availability are two different problems, and a cap works on one of them.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a British anti-poverty research body, modelled capping rent rises at inflation within a tenancy and at inflation plus two points between tenancies, starting in 2025/26. It found renting households would be an average of nearly 1,200 pounds a year better off by 2030/31. Its case rests on new analysis by the Autonomy Institute finding most landlords earn returns above comparable investments, which it argues means a cap need not push them to sell. [25]

Why it matters. The whole argument turns on whether landlord profits have room in them. If they do, a cap moves money to tenants; if they do not, it removes homes from the market.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says UK rents have risen by an average of nearly 8% in the less than two years since the last general election, close to 1,200 pounds more a year. It also finds that rent as a share of income has stayed high and roughly flat for 15 to 20 years, so the recent jump sits on top of a long squeeze rather than starting one. Rent inflation has slowed sharply in recent months. [26]

Why it matters. A slowing rate of increase is not a fall. The level people are paying stays where the fast years left it, and the slowdown only stops it climbing further.

Investopedia's read of US census data finds 61% of renters aged 35 to 44 in Florida spend 30% or more of their income on housing, which is the US government's definition of cost-burdened. Nevada is at 55% and Connecticut 53%. For this age group the rate is more than double the rate for homeowners the same age, at 22%. In Tennessee, where renters this age earn an average $67,562 against a national $88,541, half are cost-burdened. [27]

Why it matters. These are the years when childcare, car loans and student debt land at once. Housing takes its share first, because it is the bill paid before the others.

US census figures show the median monthly housing cost for a homeowner with a mortgage reached $2,035 in 2024, up 3.8% on 2023 after adjusting for inflation. The average price of buying a home rose from $238,128 in January 2019 to $365,824 in January 2025. Property insurance is part of the climb: its median annual cost rose 5.3% between 2023 and 2024. A common rule of thumb puts housing at no more than 28% of income before tax. [28]

Why it matters. The mortgage is only part of the bill. Insurance and property taxes move on their own schedule, and a fixed loan does not fix them.

About 7% of new single-family houses coming onto the US market are built for renting rather than for sale, and more than ten times as many build-to-rent homes were completed in 2024 as a decade earlier. Firms such as NexMetro develop the houses and keep them, concentrated in the Sun Belt where land is cheap and populations are growing, with booms also in Ohio and Utah. One tenant, LaZette, 87, rents a new house rather than an apartment. [29]

Why it matters. It adds homes without asking a renter to find a deposit. It also means the landlord is a company rather than a person, which changes who a tenant argues with.

Brookings, a US research institute, applied the federal benchmark that childcare should cost a family no more than 7% of its income. On that test a typical American family would need to earn more than $218,000 before tax for its expected childcare bill to be affordable, which is more than double what the median family with young children earns. The 7% figure was never a calculation of what families can bear. It came from a census report on what they actually paid between 1997 and 2011. [30]

Why it matters. The standard everyone measures against was a description of the past, not a judgement about the present. Almost nobody now clears it.

Child Care Aware of America, which tracks prices state by state, puts the national average price of childcare at $13,184 a year, more than 20% up between 2022 and 2025. The increases are wildly uneven. In Oklahoma, care for a four-year-old rose 9% while infant care rose 20%, and state data puts infant prices 36% higher since 2022. In Washington, one of the least affordable states to live in, both rose 41%. [31]

Why it matters. A national average hides a range from 9% to 41%. Two families with the same income and a child the same age are having very different years.

San Francisco will make childcare free for families earning less than $230,000 a year, and cover half the cost for families earning up to $310,000. Mayor Daniel Lurie announced it as part of a Family Opportunity Agenda, alongside measures on housing, education, food, health care and transport. The city is among the most expensive in the world, and the mayor's office said the package would cut family costs by tens of thousands of dollars a year. [32]

Why it matters. The income line is set far above what most people would call well-off, which is itself a measure of what childcare costs there.

US daycare prices rose 24% between August 2020 and August 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Investopedia. Its research team found the average annual cost of childcare ranges from $6,251 to more than $50,000 depending on the state and the kind of care, with infants costing more than toddlers. One writer described paying about $2,100 a month for a place for her seven-month-old daughter, and compared it to a second rent. [33]

Why it matters. The spread between $6,251 and $50,000 is not about the child. It is about which state the family lives in, and whether the care is a nursery or a nanny.

Joe Gyourko, writing for Brookings, argues US house prices have reached historically high levels in many markets, and that price growth has outpaced income growth almost everywhere over time. If the pattern holds, he writes, it would be the first time in US history that owning a home is generally unaffordable to the middle class across most metropolitan areas with plenty of good jobs. He puts housing alongside health care and higher education. [34]

Why it matters. It reframes a shortage of homes as a change in who can buy one at all. The comparison with health care and college points at the same pattern in three different goods.

Ivis Garcia, a professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, describes the trade many American buyers now face. The median California home sells for about $906,500, and mortgage costs there have risen 82% since January 2020. The median Texas home is $353,700, but much of the cheaper housing sits in areas with serious hurricane and flood risk. She points to Hunt, Texas, where the Guadalupe River flooded catastrophically in July 2025. [35]

Why it matters. Affordability and safety are being priced against each other. The saving is real and so is the risk, and insurance premiums are where the two eventually meet.

Fidelity Investments said US retirement savings sat at record highs in the second quarter, pushing the number of 401(k) accounts worth a million dollars or more to a record. A 401(k) is a workplace retirement pot in the United States, paid into out of salary. Loans and hardship withdrawals from those accounts also inched higher. Fidelity's Mike Shamrell said people report worry about the cost of living and inflation, but feel steadier about their own position. [36]

Why it matters. The same set of accounts is producing a record at the top and more emergency withdrawals lower down. An average across them would show neither.

The US tax agency, the IRS, repeated that it never asks for or accepts gift cards as payment of a tax bill. Since 2019 its phishing address has received more than 1,000 gift-card scam emails, averaging about 200 a year, and most of them do not even mention the IRS. Typical approaches include a call or text impersonating a government agent, a claim that the person is linked to criminal activity, and a demand for an invented penalty. [37]

Why it matters. Scammers ask for gift cards because the money moves out of reach the moment the code is read aloud. There is no account to freeze and nobody who can reverse it.

The FCA and the Information Commissioner's Office, Britain's data protection regulator, published a joint statement on how firms handle information about customers in vulnerable circumstances. A vulnerable customer here means someone especially open to harm because of their situation, such as illness, bereavement or money trouble. The two regulators say data protection law does not stop a firm acting to get good outcomes for those customers, but that the firm still has to obey it. [38]

Why it matters. Firms had been telling regulators that the two rulebooks pulled against each other. This is the pair of them saying, in one document, that they do not.

European airports warned that jet fuel could run short within weeks after the strait of Hormuz was effectively closed at the end of February, when war broke out. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded by the first wave of cancellations. The Guardian set out what UK rules give travellers on a cancelled flight: a refund or a re-routing, and compensation in some cases. Longer border checks across much of Europe added to the disruption. [39][41]

Why it matters. A cancelled flight is money already handed over. What comes back depends on the rules that cover the airline, not on how badly the trip went wrong.

easyJet launched a book with confidence promise, ruling out extra fuel charges and saying it intends to fly its full summer schedule of more than 50 million passengers. On The Beach said it would process refunds for cancelled flights the same day, and said it was the first package holiday firm to promise money back in full immediately or an alternative flight. Tui, Jet2 and other large operators have also ruled out extra charges. [40]

Why it matters. When customers start worrying about getting money back, how fast a refund arrives becomes something firms advertise. That only happens once enough people have noticed they paid in advance.