The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has announced it will be outsourcing some aspects of its IT operations to ensure systems are up to scratch.

In its business plan for the coming year the FSA said: "In order to measure our progress in transforming our IT function, we are benchmarking ourselves against our peers through a series of independent benchmark assessments by external consultants."

The report said that by doing so the FSA hoped to ensure that it would be able to fully judge the effectiveness of its IT processes.

It also revealed that the FSA had reached the IT-related targets it had imposed on itself and now hopes to reach the next set of goals by the end of March 2009, something it hopes the outsourcing will achieve.

The FSA is an independent body responsible for regulating the financial services industry in the UK.

A recent Connect survey found that the two major concerns about outsourcing services like IT support were 'loss of control' (56 per cent) and 'budget over-runs' (43 per cent).