Following the turmoil of recent months, a consensus seems to be building around tighter supervision of large regional banks in the US.

Regulatory efforts to bring increased clarity and consistency to the burgeoning ESG ratings market are a welcome development.

The US SEC has set May 2024 as the implementation date for shortening the standard settlement cycle for US securities transactions, a challenging deadline for the industry to hit. 

The European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee has agreed its position on the remaining aspects of EU implementation of Basel III. It is an important step forward, but there are plenty of issues left to iron out before a final text is agreed. 

Bankers now have a much clearer view of how their exposures to crypto will be treated from a prudential perspective. On a positive note they gained some clarity, but they are not entirely happy with the outcome.

At long last, everyone’s a winner. A new digital initiative for reporting swaps data could produce cleaner regulatory data while capping escalating reporting costs for banks.

Banks are under constant attack from cyber criminals, forcing them to turn to ever more sophisticated tools to mount an effective defence. AI is very much moving into the front line as a protection tool.

The blow-up of a particular type of UK pension fund investment strategy, which could have rolled into a global financial crisis, almost certainly paves the way for more regulation.

The quest to create global standards for ‘social’ investing took a blow recently when the European Commission decided to kick the EU’s social taxonomy into the long grass. A fragmentation of standards is now likely to proliferate.

It was supposed to turbocharge the City of London’s fortunes, but in the end the government’s long-awaited financial services bill was a bit of a damp squib. It will, however, entrench tensions between the government and regulators with potentially dangerous consequences.