Sophie Long

Sophie Long is the chief executive of Thistle Initiatives, the regulatory consultancy honoured as Compliance Consultancy Firm of the Year in the United Kingdom at the 2024 Corporate INTL Global Awards. Under her leadership the firm has grown into one of the most substantial specialist compliance advisers in British financial services, serving clients across a broad span of regulated markets.

Thistle provides regulatory compliance and change and transformation services to financial services businesses across the United Kingdom. Its offering spans regulatory compliance and financial crime support, change and transformation consulting, mergers and acquisitions and transaction services, applications and authorisations before the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority, and fully managed compliance services. This breadth allows it to support firms at every stage, from initial authorisation through day-to-day compliance to major structural change, acting as a single adviser across a range of needs that many firms would otherwise have to meet from several sources.

The consultancy works across a wide range of sectors, including investments and wealth management, credit and mortgages, insurance, digital assets and cryptocurrency, payment services and banking. Its scale is considerable: the firm draws on more than eighty consultants and industry experts and over fourteen years of experience, and reports having supported over two thousand financial services firms, facilitated more than twelve hundred FCA applications and variations, delivered hundreds of client projects in a single year, and supported many billions of pounds in merger and acquisition deal value. Few compliance consultancies can match this combination of depth of resource and breadth of sector coverage.

As chief executive, Sophie Long leads a business that has earned external recognition for the quality of its work, including designation as a leading consulting firm and ISO 9001 certification, and membership of the regulators' skilled person panel. That panel membership is a particular mark of trust, allowing the firm to be appointed to conduct independent reviews on behalf of the FCA and PRA, a role reserved for advisers the regulators regard as sufficiently expert and independent. These credentials place Thistle among the most established names in UK regulatory consulting.

The regulatory environment for financial services continues to intensify, with growing demands around consumer protection, financial crime, and the supervision of new sectors such as digital assets and payments. Firms increasingly rely on specialist consultancies to authorise their businesses, manage their compliance and navigate transactions and change. The 2024 Corporate INTL award reflects both the depth of Thistle's expertise and the breadth of the market it serves, and under Sophie Long's leadership the firm continues to be a leading choice for compliance support in the United Kingdom.