Monday’s handover of responsibility for UK financial services regulation from the FSA to the new Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) had a touch of Hercules’ second labour about it.
For the less classically inclined among you, that’s the one where Hercules lops the head off the Lernaean Hydra, only to find two heads growing back from the stump. And while I don’t intend to be malicious in comparing our new regulators to an aggressive reptilian monster, the multiple heads part at least is quite apt.
Because as well as the obvious duality of the new status quo – the PRA will supervise lenders as an arm of the Bank of England while independent agency the FCA will concentrate on ensuring good behaviour among the same pool of companies – there’s also a serious split in priorities for the new bodies.
Commenting on this week’s changing of the guard in finance, the FT’s Brooke Masters called the sector that the FCA and PRA were opening their doors to “reviled and weary” – two well chosen words.
Reviled because, as was pointed out in a report by KPMG last week. reputational issues and the restoration of consumer trust are set to be the biggest challenges faced by lenders in the months and years to come. After all, it was disappointment over the old FSA’s failure to avert the boom and bust of the late 2000s that led to George Osborne announcing the new regime back in 2010.
Weary because, having experienced a more severe drubbing in 2008 than most of the world’s financial centres, and with a UK economy still barely hovering beyond the grip of recession, financial institutions of all kinds are desperate for room to grow.
On the one hand, the new regulators have consumers (and those who rely on their votes) expecting a bloody-knuckled champion, and banks begging for a pair of watchdogs that won’t drown them in twin torrents of red tape.
The situation is summarised nicely on the FCA’s home page, where a photograph of a woman on a British high street, captioned “Making sure consumers get a fair deal” sits alongside an image of a confident-looking businessman, captioned “Making markets work well”. The consumer and the businessman are facing in different directions.
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