Prescriptive and judgement-based regulation of financial services: Are they compatible?

Speakers: Professor Philip Rawlings (Roy Goode Professor of Commercial Law, QMUL), Dr Paul Fisher (Deputy Head & Executive Director, Supervisory Risk and Regulatory Operations, Prudential Regulation Authority), Mr Alan Brener (Santander UK Plc, on secondment to the Banking Standards Review Council)
Chair: Dr Iris Chiu (UCL)
Accreditation: 1 CPD hour SRA and BSB

The financial crisis has ushered in not only more regulation but a regulatory approach that is more surveillance-based, judgment dependent and pre-emptive in nature. This is set against a background of increased distrust of financial institutions by the public, media and regulators. The UCL Centre for Ethics and Law is engaging in examining approaches to governance in this new climate of financial regulation.

We have assembled a panel to discuss:

• What is the relationship between rules and discretion based regulation and what are their limitations?
• Is rules based regulation equally applicable to prudential and conduct regulation?
• To what extent can self-regulation of financial institutions satisfy aspects of the regulatory agenda?
• How can the financial services industry improve culture and ethics and rebuild trust and how do they address conduct risk?
• Where does judgment-based regulation fit within these developments?

There are many more questions that we hope the panel and audience will raise.

Our panel of speakers is drawn from different backgrounds, and will provide insights into the approaches of the regulator and the financial services industry and highlight the theoretical perspectives. The event allows us to put the academic platform forward as a bridge to engage with and mediate the discourse in this area.

Biographies of the speakers

Philip Rawlings

Philip Rawlings is the inaugural Sir Roy Goode Professor of Commercial Law, Director of the Insurance Law Institute at CCLS and a committee member of the British Insurance Law Association. Previously, he was Professor of the Law of Finance at University College London and has held posts at the University of Warwick, Brunel University and Aberystwyth University. He is the author/co-author of more than ten books and fifty papers on, among other things, the law of insurance, banking, regulation, sale and legal history. He is an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers (ACIB).

Paul Fisher

Paul Fisher was appointed Deputy Head of the PRA and Executive Director for Supervisory Risk and Regulatory Operations on 1 June 2014. In this role, Paul is responsible for Supervisory Oversight, Supervisory Support, the PRA Chief Operating Officer and, through a Director of Specialist Risk Supervision, the PRA Risk Specialists. Paul is a member of several senior management committees of the Bank and in due course, he will be appointed to the PRA Board.

Paul joined the Bank in 1990, having previously worked at the University of Warwick between 1980 and 1990 where he specialised in research on macroeconomic models. He has been part of the Bank’s senior staff since 1995 and was until recently a member of the Monetary Policy Committee and until 2013 the Interim Financial Policy Committee.

Paul has written extensively on the Bank’s operations, monetary policy, financial markets, exchange rates and modelling of the UK economy. He achieved a BSc in economics with statistics at the University of Bristol in 1980, an MA in economics (1983) and a PhD in macroeconomic modelling (1990), both from the University of Warwick.

Alan Brener

Alan is currently on secondment from Santander UK working for Dame Colette Bowe helping to set up the Banking Standards Council. He has worked at Santander UK since 2005 covering, at various times, compliance, regulatory policy, retail legal and improving customer service. Prior to this Alan worked for NatWest/RBS as Director of Compliance for the retail banking business.

He has been an insurance prudential and conduct regulator and in the later 1980s worked at the Department of Trade and Industry in a range of areas including: appraising inward investment projects, assisting with privatisations and as a private secretary.

Alan was called to the Bar but never practiced instead going into the commercial world as a Chartered Accountant. Alan is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Banking in Scotland and has studied economics and foreign policy at Columbia University in New York and is in the process of obtaining a Law Masters degree (banking law, regulation of financial markets, corporate governance) from his alma mater: University College London.