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This page brings together every guide published on SMF Capital, organised by topic so you can find the specific FCA Senior Manager Function, service, or article you’re looking for without searching through the blog archive.

SMF Capital exists to cover a gap that sits between our four sister recruitment practices — FD Capital, Exec Capital, NED Capital and Accountancy Capital — and the specific regulatory accountability that the FCA’s Senior Managers and Certification Regime attaches to certain senior appointments at authorised firms. An SMF designation isn’t simply a job title with a form attached at the end. It’s personal, evidenced regulatory accountability, assessed against a fit and proper test before the individual is ever allowed to start, and the recruitment process for filling one needs to reflect that from the first conversation, not as an afterthought once a hiring decision has already been made. The guides on this site set out, designation by designation, what the FCA and PRA actually expect, what a strong candidate profile looks like, and where firms most often get the search wrong.

The site is organised into a small number of clear categories. The non-executive board designations cover the Chair of the Governing Body, the Senior Independent Director, and the various committee chair roles — Risk, Audit and Remuneration — that sit at board level and carry independent oversight responsibility. The executive functions cover the designations held by senior managers actually running the business day to day, including the Chief Executive, Chief Risk Officer, Head of Internal Audit, Compliance Oversight, the Money Laundering Reporting Officer, and several less commonly discussed designations that firms nonetheless need to get right, including the Other Overall Responsibility function and the Partner function used at regulated partnerships and LLPs.

Beyond the individual designations, the site also covers the finance and compliance teams that sit underneath an SMF holder and, in practice, determine whether that individual can genuinely stand behind the numbers and assessments they’re personally accountable for — client money and CASS specialists, Financial Controllers at FCA-regulated firms, and the regulatory reporting function that produces the returns a Compliance Oversight or MLRO holder signs off. A final set of articles covers the practical mechanics of how SMF searches actually run in the real world — realistic timelines from brief through to Form A approval, current benchmark pay across the full range of designations, and the board dynamics, such as the working relationship between a Chair and a Chief Executive, that determine whether an appointment succeeds once it’s made.

Every guide on this site is written from direct search experience rather than as a restatement of the FCA Handbook, and every search we run — executive or non-executive — is led personally by Adrian Lawrence FCA.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for below, or want to discuss a specific SMF appointment directly, call 0203 137 2496 or email recruitment@smfcapital.co.uk.