'Remove the straitjacket of statutory rules' for UK fintech

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.”

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