On 15 October 2020, HM Treasury issued a call for evidence concerning access to cash. The Government committed at the March 2020 Budget to bring forward legislation to protect access to cash and ensure that the UK’s cash infrastructure is sustainable in the long term. This will ensure that those who may be less able to benefit from wider moves to digital payment methods are not left behind, and that cash continues to be available…

On 14 October 2020, the Bank for International Settlements published a speech by Kevin Stiroh (Co-Chair of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Risks of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and Executive Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) on the Basel Committee’s initiatives on climate-related financial risks. In his speech Mr Stiroh shares some of the key findings from the Basel Committee’s stocktake of members’ existing regulatory and supervisory initiatives…

On 15 October 2020, HM Treasury published its response to the consultation that it published in July 2020 concerning updating the UK’s prudential regime before the end of the transition period. HM Treasury has also published the following draft statutory instrument, The Financial Holding Companies (Approval etc.) and Capital Requirements (Capital Buffers and Macro-Prudential Measures (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020. Key points in the response include: The UK Government intends to legislate in a…

In the latest episode of the UK Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) podcast, panellists from the FIU and the National Crime Agency (NCA) discuss the unique importance of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in combatting modern slavery and human trafficking – and how to make these SARs more helpful. SARs are essential in identifying potential modern slavery because the victims of modern slavery are some of the most vulnerable in our society. Very few victims come…

For the next in our series of webinars where we explore topics where regulatory and insolvency issues meet, we will be joined by members of Grant Thornton’s restructuring and insolvency team to provide an update on the challenges currently facing retail banks, who have been at the forefront of the regulatory response to COVID-19. The Autumn will be a critical time for retail banks and other firms operating in the retail financial services sector. In…

On 14 October 2020, the European Banking Authority (EBA) issued a public consultation to propose revising the guidelines on major incident reporting under the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). The proposal aims at optimising and simplifying the reporting process, capturing additional relevant security incidents, reducing the number of operational incidents that will be reported, and improving the meaningfulness of the incident reports received. The revision of the guidelines also intends to decrease the reporting burden…

On 14 October 2020, the PRA published a new webpage concerning a recent IRB mortgage virtual roundtable it hosted. The roundtable followed the publication of Policy Statement 11/20: Credit risk: Probability of Default and Loss Given Default estimation. During the virtual roundtable the PRA used an internal ratings based model to calculate capital requirements for residential mortgage exposures.…