It is common in politics to talk about a lack of bank regulation. The word salad of clichés involves stuff like “casino capitalism, Wild West, bonuses, financial crisis and Lehman Brothers”.
The leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition knows he’ll get an instant round of applause with blood-and-guts quotes like this: “For 40 years, deregulated finance has progressively become more powerful. Its dominance over industry, obvious and destructive; its control of politics, pernicious and undemocratic.”
Ah, but the view from banking is now rather different. Since the 2008 financial crisis, at least, the industry has been inundated with new rules. It’s an alphabet soup of initiatives. Since the crisis we’ve had AIFMD and UCITS 5 for asset managers, Basel III for banks, PRIIPS for retail investment providers and Mifid II for pretty much everybody. Not to mention GDPR, the rules to stop unauthorised data-sharing, something every business needs to obey.
And for high street banks there’s been the revolution known as open banking, or PSD2 for acronym junkies. Since January, they’ve been required to offer third-party providers access to customer bank accounts, so long as the customer consents.