One lesson to be learned from banking scandals could be that regulators – and the general public – need a ‘throat to choke’, a ‘head on a spike’, or, in regulatory parlance, ‘an accountable person’. Individual accountability has become a trend, with the UK, Australia and Hong Kong recently expanding their existing regimes. Singapore is currently running a consultation, and Ireland and Malaysia are expected to follow suit with rules of their own.
This means that when things go wrong, senior bankers will no longer be able to blame rogue individuals or insist many people were collectively responsible. In the UK, the problem of ‘many hands’ was most pronounced in the parliamentary hearings that followed the financial crisis, when politicians heard of an ‘accountability firewall’, making it difficult to identify the individuals responsible for a bank’s wrongdoing.
