'Remove the straitjacket of statutory rules' for UK fintech
A&O Shearman
A&O Shearman
Partner Barney Reynolds, speaking at UK FinTech Week 2021, recommended that financial regulators focus primarily on risk rather than code and control. The panel discussion, Trust vs Innovation: Finding the Regulatory Balance for a Strong FinTech Sector, featured senior regulators from the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and Malta.
Panelists included: Alex Roy, Head of Department – Consumer Distribution Policy area, FCA Barney Reynolds, Global Head of the Financial Services Industry Group, Shearman & Sterling Clara KL Chiu, Director of Licensing and Head of Fintech Unit Intermediaries, Securities and Futures Commission Mark Adams, Senior Executive Leader, Strategic Intelligence, ASIC Luciano Brincat, Senior Manager – Strategy Policy & Innovation, Malta Financial Services Authority Kay Swinburne, Vice Chair of Financial Services, KPMG (moderator)
Click here to watch the panel discussion, or click here for coverage and analysis of the panel discussion by Finextra.
During a panel for UK Fintech Week 2021, Barnabas Reynolds, global head of the financial services group at Shearman & Sterling, emphasised that to build trust in the system and allow space for fintech innovation, that the focus of supervisory systems should be on risk and not unnecessary code or control.
While noting that the FCA sandbox was a global innovation when it was first introduced, Reynolds stated that “we now need to move to the next level of innovation [in the UK] to remove the straitjacket of statutory rules.”
Reynolds also calls for removal of the “blankets of inherited EU law so that the system is able to operate at its best - as the global gold standard, protecting consumers from their assets worldwide when using UK based financial services virtually.”
“We should only legislate or regulate for identifiable problems. We can move quickly to produce new regulations as the market develops to deal with a new problem, but we shouldn't have a Cartesian approach of trying to provide a blanket of law regulation for a sector, in advance of it developing.”
