CONC: why it applies to consumer, not business, credit
If you have read anything about borrowing protections in the United Kingdom, you may have come across the abbreviation CONC. It stands for the Consumer Credit sourcebook, and it is the detailed rulebook the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) uses to govern consumer credit. CONC is an important part of how individual borrowers are protected, and it is worth understanding on its own terms. It is also worth understanding what CONC does not reach, because lending to a limited company for business purposes sits outside it. This article explains both, as a piece of regulatory commentary rather than advice about your own circumstances.
What CONC is
CONC is one of the FCA’s specialist sourcebooks. When the regulation of consumer credit moved to the FCA in 2014, the FCA brought together the conduct rules for that market into CONC. It covers the whole life of a consumer-credit relationship: how a product is advertised, the information a borrower must be given before signing, how affordability and creditworthiness should be assessed, how firms should treat customers who fall into arrears, and how they should handle people in vulnerable circumstances.
Behind CONC sit the Consumer Credit Act 1974 and the FCA’s wider Principles for Businesses. Together they form the framework that protects individuals when they borrow — on credit cards, personal loans, hire purchase and similar products. These are genuine, valuable protections, and we are not suggesting otherwise.
Why it governs consumer, not business, credit
The clue is in the name: CONC is about consumer credit. Its scope follows the regulated activities defined under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001 — FSMA RAO 2001 — in particular Article 60B, with the definitions in Article 60L. Those provisions frame consumer credit around lending to an individual.
A limited company or a limited liability partnership is not an individual. It is a separate legal person, a body corporate, capable of borrowing in its own name. When the borrower is a body corporate and the loan is for business purposes, the agreement is not a regulated consumer-credit agreement, and so the CONC rulebook does not apply to it. The accurate way to put it is this: CONC is the consumer regime, and our business lending sits outside that regime because we lend to the company, not to an individual.
We should be careful with our language here. It would be wrong to describe our position as a “Consumer Credit Act exemption”, because that frames the law the wrong way round — the point is not that a consumer rule has been switched off, but that a company borrower was never inside the consumer regime to begin with. The Consumer Credit Act 1974 governs consumer credit, which this is not.
What this means in practice
Because CONC does not govern our lending, the specific CONC procedures — and the consumer-credit escalation routes that go with them — do not attach to it. This product is not covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. After our own internal complaints process, the final escalation is the courts. We say this plainly because pretending otherwise would mislead you.
It does not follow that a company borrower is unprotected. General contract law applies, as do the rules on data protection and unfair terms, and the basic obligation to act honestly and fairly. We also choose to mirror several good practices found in the consumer world — clear pre-contract information, treating people in difficulty with care, and a proper complaints process — not because CONC compels us, but because we think they are the right way to lend. You can see how we approach decisions on our how we lend page, and how we handle concerns through feedback and complaints.
The wider point for directors
If you run a company and you are weighing up finance, the lesson is not that CONC is irrelevant to you — it tells you a great deal about what good lending looks like. The lesson is that you should not assume CONC’s statutory protections automatically apply to business borrowing, because often they will not. Check who the borrower is and what the product is regulated as before you rely on any protection.
For a fuller treatment of where the line falls, see our guide to regulated versus unregulated business loans. And for the amounts, terms and costs we currently offer, the most reliable source is always our business loans page. CONC matters; knowing when it applies matters just as much.
