By What Changed, and When
The reform removes two rules from the FCA’s Conduct of Business Sourcebook. The first is the waiting period, either one day or seven, between publication of an approved prospectus or registration document and the release of connected research, meaning research written by analysts at the banks running the IPO. In practice the seven-day version applied by default, because issuers rarely used the alternative that required a joint briefing with independent analysts. The second rule scrapped is the requirement that firms give unconnected analysts the same information as their own research teams. The effect is that connected research can now be published simultaneously with the prospectus rather than a week after it. That compresses the public phase of a UK IPO, which is the window during which market conditions can move against a deal, and it is exactly the friction the FCA set out to remove. The change finalises the proposals in CP26/14, the consultation the regulator opened in April and closed in May. Removing the wait does not make a UK IPO instantaneous. It compresses the sequence, an approved prospectus and connected research can now land together, then the offer period runs to pricing and admission, but the timetable is now gated by other steps rather than a mandatory research pause. Chief among them is the FCA’s prospectus-approval process itself and the offer-period requirements under the Public Offers and Admissions to Trading regime that took effect in January, which sets how long securities must be offered before trading begins. With the seven-day research delay gone, those become the pacing constraints a UK float now works around.Why London Is Doing This Now
The reform is one piece of a broad campaign to revive the City’s primary market. London has lost listings to New York for years, dogged by persistent valuation discounts on UK-listed shares and a shrinking IPO pipeline, and the government has leaned on the regulator to respond. The FCA committed to accelerating IPO applications in a December 2025 letter to the Prime Minister, and this change sits alongside the new Public Offers and Admissions to Trading regime that replaced the old UK Prospectus Regulation in January. It also fits a wider pattern of FCA activity aimed at modernising UK markets, from rules opening the door to tokenised funds to expanded crypto authorisations for firms like Robinhood. The through-line is a regulator trying to make London a more attractive place to list and operate, and treating the post-2018 rulebook as friction to be trimmed rather than protection to be preserved.The Tradeoff Buried in the Rule
The seven-day wait was not arbitrary, and removing it involves a genuine tradeoff worth naming. The 2018 regime was designed to encourage independent, or “unconnected,” research during IPOs, specifically to counter the risk that research written by the deal’s own banks would dominate the narrative. The waiting period gave outside analysts time to access management and publish their own view before the connected research landed. By the FCA’s own account, that mechanism largely failed: issuers rarely held the joint briefings that would have given unconnected analysts equal access, so the rule mostly just added delay without producing the independent coverage it was meant to. As a result, removing it is defensible on the evidence. But the consequence is still that connected research, produced by the banks with a commercial interest in the deal succeeding, can now shape investor perceptions from the first day with no built-in gap for independent voices. The FCA has traded a protection that underdelivered for execution speed that issuers wanted, and the bet is that faster deals matter more to London’s competitiveness than a waiting period that was not achieving its purpose.Investor Takeaway
Connected research now sets the narrative from day one with no mandatory gap for independent analysis, so investors should weigh bank-affiliated IPO research accordingly.
