If you hold a UK payment licence you are not using, you are holding an asset with a shelf life. The FCA is actively cancelling dormant SPI and API permissions. A live, clean licence can be sold to a buyer who wants a faster route into the market. A cancelled one is worth nothing, and you cannot get it back without applying again. This is what is happening, why your unused licence is perishable, what it is worth, and how to act before the regulator decides for you.
If you want to sell a dormant payment institution licence, the window to do it is open now and it is closing. On 15 June 2026 the FCA cancelled the authorisation of RVB Currency UK, an Authorised Payment Institution, for failing to file its returns, failing to keep its anti-money laundering registration current, and failing to engage with the regulator (FCA, June 2026). It was not the first this year, and it will not be the last. For an owner sitting on a licence that is not being used, the lesson is direct. The permission has real value while it is live. It has none once it is gone.
Most coverage of this trend is written for buyers, warning them off dormant licences. This is written for the other side of the table. You hold the asset. You may not know it is at risk, and you may not know what it is worth. Both of those facts have a deadline on them.
One quick note on language. Throughout this article, “licence” is shorthand. An API is authorised; an SPI is registered. The legal label differs, but the commercial point is the same: both have value while live, and both lose it once cancelled.
The FCA is cancelling dormant licences, and the pattern is clear
The regulator is removing payment permissions that are not being used. This is a settled pattern now, not a one-off.
RVB Currency UK lost its API authorisation on 15 June 2026. The FCA found it was no longer meeting the conditions for authorisation: it was not on the anti-money laundering register, it had not filed its FSA056 returns for two years running, and it had not responded to the regulator’s letters (FCA, June 2026). Months earlier, in February 2026, the FCA cancelled Stallion Money Limited’s authorisation as an API. Stallion had provided no payment services since November 2020, had dropped off the money-laundering register, had not submitted returns, and had not paid its fees (FCA Final Notice, 24 February 2026).
The same thing has been happening to smaller firms. Fidelity Payment Services lost its Small Payment Institution registration in May 2025, almost nine years after it registered and never having provided a single payment service (FCA Final Notice, 15 May 2025). Transfer Now, First Money Services and VictorianFX followed the same path through 2025, each cancelled for inactivity, lapsed money-laundering registration, or both. The FCA register now carries a long list of cancelled institutions.
The direction is one way. Advisers have started calling it a “use it or lose it” posture, and the description fits.
What the law actually allows
The FCA does not need a scandal to cancel a dormant licence. It only needs the licence to be dormant.
Under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, the FCA can cancel an authorisation on several grounds (regulation 10, legislation.gov.uk). Three matter most to an inactive firm. It can cancel if the firm has not provided payment services within 12 months of being authorised. It can cancel if the firm has ceased business activity for more than six months. And it can cancel if the firm no longer meets the conditions for authorisation, which includes letting its anti-money laundering registration lapse or failing to file required returns. The same grounds apply to Small Payment Institutions through regulation 15.
Read those grounds again with your own firm in mind. If you have not transacted in over a year, the trigger already exists. If your returns or your HMRC anti-money laundering registration have slipped, you have handed the regulator a second reason. Dormancy is not a grey area. It is a defined condition the rules are built to remove.
How fast it happens
Cancellation follows a process, so this is not a same-day risk. It is a certain one.
The FCA issues a warning notice, considers any response, then issues a decision notice. The firm has 28 days to refer the matter to the Upper Tribunal. If it does not, the cancellation takes effect (regulation 10, PSRs 2017). The firms cancelled this year mostly did not respond at all. The point for an owner is not that the regulator moves overnight. It is that once a warning notice lands, the conversation has changed, and the value of the licence has already started to fall. Acting before that letter arrives is worth far more than reacting to it.
Why is an unused licence a perishable asset?
A live payment licence is worth money to the right buyer. A cancelled one is worth nothing to anyone. That gap is the whole point.
What makes a licence valuable
The value of your licence is the time and the uncertainty it saves a buyer who would otherwise apply from scratch.
Applying for FCA authorisation is slow and far from certain. The statutory deadline is three months, but only once the application is complete, and an application is complete only when the FCA has everything it needs. That clock tends to start late and pauses whenever the regulator asks for more, so advisers report well-prepared applications taking six to nine months and weak ones running past eighteen or being sent back to start again. A meaningful share are refused or withdrawn. So a buyer who wants to be in the market this year, with permissions already granted, has two choices: wait and risk rejection, or buy a firm that already holds the licence. Your licence is the second option. That is what gives it value.
This is why acquiring an authorised firm remains a common and sensible route into UK payments. The buyer is paying to skip the queue and the risk. You are the one holding what they want to buy.
Once it is cancelled, the value is gone
The asymmetry is brutal, and it is the reason to act.
While your licence is live, it is an asset you can sell. Once the FCA cancels the authorisation or registration, the permission no longer has any saleable value. The company may still exist, but a buyer cannot acquire a permission that has already gone. To operate, they would need a fresh authorisation, or they would buy another live firm instead. You would be back at the start, with no head start and no guarantee. Every month a dormant licence sits unused, it moves closer to that outcome and quietly loses value. Time is not neutral here. It works against the licence.
What is a dormant payment licence actually worth?
Not every dormant licence is worth the same, and some are worth very little. An honest look at your own firm matters more than a hopeful one.
What raises the value
A buyer pays for a clean, usable licence, not a problem to fix.
The licences that sell well share a few traits. The compliance record is current: returns filed, fees paid, anti-money laundering and HMRC registrations in good standing. Ownership is clear and the people behind the firm are fit and proper. The permissions are useful, covering services a buyer actually wants. Bank and safeguarding relationships are intact, or at least not a barrier. Even modest genuine activity helps, because it shows the licence is real and operating, not a name on the register. A buyer looking at a firm like that sees a head start. They will pay for it.
What destroys the value
The same things the FCA cancels licences for are the things that make a licence hard to sell.
If your returns have lapsed, your anti-money laundering registration has dropped, you have ignored the FCA’s letters, or you are operating under a voluntary undertaking or a warning notice, your licence is already losing value, and it is already on the path the regulator is clearing. A buyer’s lawyer will find these problems in diligence and price them down, if the buyer does not simply walk away. Be honest with yourself about which firm you are. If you are clean but underused, you have an asset and a window. If you are already lapsing, you have less time and less value than you think, and the case for acting now is stronger, not weaker.
This is the uncomfortable part, so it is worth saying plainly. A dormant licence is not guaranteed cash. It is potential value with an expiry date. What you do in the next few months decides whether it becomes a sale or a cancellation.
Token activity will not keep a licence alive
A single transaction a month is not the same as operating, and the regulator knows the difference.
Some owners assume that running the occasional payment keeps a dormant licence safe. It does not. The FCA looks at whether a firm is genuinely providing payment services, filing its returns, and meeting its conditions. It does not look for proof that a firm can manage one token transaction. Stallion Money had provided no real service since 2020 when its authorisation went. If your plan is to keep a licence alive in order to sell it, the bar is real, ongoing activity and a current compliance record, not the minimum needed to look busy. Buyers apply the same test. A licence that transacts only to stay on the register reads as a shell to them too, and they price it as one.
How to capitalise before the regulator forces the question
There are two moves, and they run in order. Stop the value bleeding, then run a proper sale.
Step one: stop the bleed
Before you can sell a licence, you have to make it sellable.
That means getting current, now. File the outstanding returns. Restore your anti-money laundering and HMRC registrations. Respond to any FCA correspondence rather than letting it sit. If you are under a voluntary undertaking, understand exactly what it restricts and what it would take to resolve. None of this is glamorous, and all of it directly protects the value of the asset. A licence that is clean and responsive is one a buyer can complete on. A licence under an open cloud is one a buyer discounts or avoids.
Step two: run a real process, not a fire sale
Selling a regulated licence is a transaction the regulator is part of. It is not a quick cash-out, and treating it like one leaves value on the table.
A proper process means understanding what your licence is worth before you talk to anyone, finding a buyer who will pass FCA scrutiny, and managing the regulatory handover so the deal actually completes. The change of control is where these deals are won or lost, and it works differently depending on what you hold. Getting that part wrong can stall a sale for months or sink it entirely. Getting it right is most of the job, and it is the part an owner selling alone tends to underestimate.
Selling an API and selling an SPI are not the same deal
The licence type changes the weight of the deal, but not the regulator’s role in approving your buyer. Most owners do not know that, and it matters.
If you hold an API
Selling an Authorised Payment Institution brings the FCA directly into the transaction.
A buyer acquiring control of an authorised firm must notify the FCA in advance, and the regulator assesses whether the new owner is fit and proper to hold the licence. The FCA can object. A clean, well-run licence makes that assessment smoother and faster. A dormant licence with compliance gaps makes it slower and riskier, because the regulator is already looking at the firm with concern. So the same problems that put your licence at risk of cancellation also make it harder to sell. Clearing them is not optional preparation. It is what makes the deal possible.
If you hold an SPI
Selling a Small Payment Institution is lighter than selling an API, but not because the regulator steps back.
An SPI is registered rather than authorised and sits under a narrower regime, with lighter capital, prudential and conduct requirements than an API. But it is not outside the FCA’s change-of-control rules. The same controller approval applies. Anyone acquiring control of an SPI, broadly a holding of 10 per cent or more, must notify the FCA and obtain approval before the deal completes, and the FCA can object if the buyer is not fit and proper. The regulator did exactly that in 2024, refusing the proposed acquisition of an SPI money remitter because the buyer could not satisfy it (FCA Final Notice, December 2024). Completing without approval is a criminal offence. So the practical point matches the API: the buyer has to be acceptable to the regulator, and the licence has to be clean enough to clear that bar.
The practical takeaway is the same for both. The regulator decides whether your buyer gets to keep what they bought. A clean licence clears that bar. A dormant one struggles.
What is changing in 2026, and why the window is narrowing
The direction of travel is toward more scrutiny, not less. Two developments make that clear.
The first is safeguarding. Firms already had to safeguard customer money, but from 7 May 2026 the FCA’s strengthened rules raised the bar (FCA Policy Statement PS25/12). This Supplementary Regime tightens expectations around records, reconciliations, reporting, and an annual safeguarding audit, ahead of a further regime still to come. A dormant firm cannot easily show safeguarding discipline it has never had to run. That makes the gap between a real, operating licence and a dormant shell easier for both the regulator and a buyer to see.
The second is structural. In April 2026 the Treasury confirmed it would consolidate the Payment Systems Regulator into the FCA, moving toward a single regulator for the sector (HM Treasury, April 2026). One regulator with a broader remit and a data-driven approach to supervision is not a regulator likely to overlook a register full of inactive firms. The oversight is tightening, and the room for a dormant licence to sit quietly is shrinking.
Put the two together. The standard for a real licence is rising, and the room for a dormant one to sit unnoticed is shrinking. Waiting does not improve your position.
What to do next
If you hold a payment licence you are not using, treat it as an asset with a clock on it.
Three things are true at once. The FCA is actively cancelling dormant SPI and API licences. A live, clean licence still has real value to a buyer who wants a faster route into the market. And that value disappears entirely the day the licence is cancelled. The owners who do well are the ones who act while the licence is still theirs to sell, not the ones who wait for a warning notice and then try to salvage something.
Vertice Fintech brokers the sale and acquisition of SPI and API regulated payment institutions in the UK. We have completed 23 acquisitions in 2025, and the founder has worked in UK regulated payments since 2007. We value the licence honestly, find a buyer who passes FCA scrutiny, and manage the change of control so the deal completes. If your licence is sitting idle, the most expensive thing you can do is nothing.
Speak to Rodolfo about a confidential mandate.
Frequently asked questions
Can the FCA cancel my payment licence if I am not using it?
Yes. Under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, the FCA can cancel an authorisation if a firm provides no payment services within 12 months of being authorised, or ceases business activity for more than six months, or stops meeting the conditions for authorisation. The same grounds apply to Small Payment Institutions. Inactivity alone is enough.
I hold a dormant SPI or API. Is it worth anything?
While the licence is live and reasonably clean, yes, it has value to a buyer who wants to avoid the FCA application process. Once it is cancelled, it is worth nothing, because the permission no longer exists and cannot be transferred. The value depends on your compliance record, your permissions, and how quickly you act.
How quickly could I lose my licence?
Cancellation follows a process: a warning notice, then a decision notice, then 28 days to refer the matter to the Upper Tribunal. It is not same-day. But the FCA is actively pursuing dormant firms, and a licence with lapsed returns or registrations is already on that path. The value starts falling well before the licence is formally gone.
Can I sell a dormant payment institution licence?
Yes, but it is a regulated transaction, not an instant cash-out. The buyer must be able to pass FCA scrutiny and keep the licence compliant, and the change of control has to be managed properly. A clean, live licence sells. One with unresolved compliance problems is heavily discounted or unsellable.
What is the difference between selling an SPI and an API?
Both can trigger FCA change-of-control approval when someone acquires control, so in both cases the buyer must be judged fit and proper and the FCA can object. The difference is the weight of the regime around the licence. An API is authorised and carries heavier capital, prudential and conduct requirements. An SPI is registered and lighter on those, but the controller approval still applies. Either way, a clean licence completes and a neglected one does not.
What makes my licence more valuable to a buyer?
A current compliance record: returns filed, fees paid, anti-money laundering and HMRC registrations in order. Clear ownership and fit-and-proper management. Useful permissions, intact banking and safeguarding relationships, and even modest genuine activity. A buyer pays for a licence they can use immediately, not one they have to repair.
Is it faster for a buyer to apply for their own licence instead?
Usually not. The FCA’s three-month deadline only starts once the application is complete, and in practice well-prepared applications take six to nine months, with weaker ones longer or unsuccessful. A meaningful share are refused or withdrawn. Buying a firm that already holds the licence removes that wait and that risk, which is exactly what gives your licence its value.
