Emerging Themes in Financial Regulation & Disputes

For 2024, our overarching theme is ‘People in Focus‘, because although financial services is seeing exponential growth and adoption of technological innovation, we still work in a people business where success depends on the quality of our human capital, the strength of the connections between individuals and their capacity to navigate change.  Within this theme we examine three main pillars: Consumers, Change and Conduct.

Against an unsettling backdrop of high economic and geopolitical uncertainty, in 2023 our theme was “Protecting What’s Important” and we focused on three areas where we saw the most complexities arising:- Building safer markets; Emerging risks; and Digital assets and Cryptocurrencies.

Our 12th annual edition focused on the key areas where businesses could draw on  learnings from the pandemic and the emerging regulatory and political landscape to build nimble and resilient business models.R

2020 brought disruption on a previously unimagined scale. As we looked to 2021, it was clear that with the fall-out from the global pandemic, Brexit, and the headwinds of legal and regulatory change, the coming year was to continue to provide challenges - how we responded to those challenges would shape businesses for many years to come.

Our overarching theme this year is “Global Regulation, Local Solutions”. More than ever, misconduct can lead to consequences with multiple agencies spanning a range of jurisdictions as well as a range of related authorities. Having global capabilities to manage legal and regulatory risks in each of the main jurisdictions is key, but equally important is recognising the unique approaches and expectations of each relevant authority.

More than ever before, our clients were having to view the world from new angles. It is no exaggeration to say that the legal and regulatory landscape that our clients faced over the coming months had never been less certain.

Our theme reflected the key importance to businesses of managing – and generating commercial advantage from – huge data flows, and the attempts of our national and European authorities both to seek to regulate the use of this data by financial institutions in the modern age, and to harness the power of data themselves in order to regulate more effectively.

The intense pace of change of financial regulation has been a recurring theme for this publication over recent years, but it is true to say that the UK’s decision to leave the European Union took us into entirely uncharted territory.

The pace of change in financial regulation was fast as ever, yet we also sensed a shift in the dynamic   between the regulator and government. There was more talk of the importance of promoting the   competitiveness of the UK as a financial market, an objective that was roundly rejected by the Treasury   in the aftermath to the 2008 crisis.

Few would have disagreed that a significant improvement was needed in banking standards or that bankers be remunerated in a way that incentivises good behaviour, and reform of the Approved Persons regime was long overdue.