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The Financial Conduct Authority will avoid introducing fresh rules as its stock response to new forms of market failure, its boss has said, as the regulator looks to avoid time-consuming consultation processes and speed up its action.
Nikhil Rathi told the Fairer Finance podcast that “not every problem can be solved quickly” by the watchdog pushing through fresh rounds of red tape, and instead FCA officials will rely on its framework of existing rules.
“I think that there’s a whole range of influences that are informing our willingness to write lots of new rules…. we’re moving to an outcomes-based approach,” he said on the podcast’s inaugural episode, “and that will mean less rules in the future because we think the Consumer Duty will do a lot of the work for us.”
Rathi’s remarks constitute the clearest indication to date of the regulator’s shift away from the rules-based approach it has mostly taken since its inception. The watchdog is legally obliged to carry out lengthy industry consultations whenever it introduces new rules in a process which can often last several months.
But the frenzied adoption of new technologies like artificial intelligence by the UK’s finance industry – and ministers’ concerted push for simpler regulation – has triggered a reappraisal of the FCA’s stock approach.
FCA opts out of prescriptive rules on AI
Officials have swerved introducing prescriptive rules on AI, in an acknowledgement that a line-by-line regulation of the technology would not be able to keep up with companies’ ever-changing behaviour. Instead, it has rolled out an AI ‘sandbox’, which it hopes will give regulated firms a sanitised environment to experiment with the disruptive technology hand in glove with the watchdog.
Earlier this month, the FCA also hailed action it has taken to bring down the cost of premium finance, which allows customers to pay car and home insurance bills on a monthly basis, as a blueprint for its fresh approach.
It argued that firms it had identified least likely to provide fair value to customers had reduced their annual percentage rate (APR) – the interest customers pay on the finance – by as much as seven per cent without the watchdog introducing new rules. Instead, it leveraged powers under Consumer Duty, a broader set of powers by which the FCA seeks to oversee customer protection, in a move it said saved consumers £157m a year.
“What’s clear from this interview is that the regulatory winds have changed over the last 18 months,” said James Daley, managing director of Fairer Finance.
“The FCA is under pressure from the Treasury to prioritise growth and to deal with market failure and misconduct through supervisory conversations behind closed doors.”
