In his Mansion House speech George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said he would abolish the Financial Services Authority and give most of its power to the Bank of England, undoing the regulatory system set up by Gordon Brown when the Labour party came to power in 1997. What will this announcement actually mean for the financial services industry? Perhaps a return to the pre-millennium world of "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" in the form of the Bank of England accompanied by self-regulatory organisations such as IMRO and LAUTRO? The answer is most definitely not.
This article was first published on Complinet, a market-leading daily, web-based news service for compliance professionals in the financial services sector.