“Post-Brexit regulatory shake-up: What could be the implications of a Big Bang 2.0?”

Jul 20, 2022 | Financial Services

The ‘Big Bang’ of the 1980s had far-reaching consequences. Rules, many unwritten traditions involving all sorts of handshakes which had held together the City and our financial system for possibly a couple of hundred years, were binned in the name of Thatcherite, free-market progress. Suddenly, you could become a merchant banker without having been to public school and banks could own stockbrokers and insurance companies. Anyone could become a dealer in all sorts of things no-one had previously heard of, fortunes were made, then lost, when it all came home to roost in 2009. And here, it seems, we go again, with a post-Brexit Big Bang 2. To paraphrase the late, great George Micheal, what have we learned from all this pain? Very little, I suspect.

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“Simon Evan-Cook: FCA must wake up to consolidation damage”

“Simon Evan-Cook: FCA must wake up to consolidation damage”

This is where I can don my ‘been around the block, seen it all before’ mantle. What’s happening in our business/industry/profession at the moment is a lot of what’s become known as consolidation, big companies, many fuelled by private equity, buying up smaller firms or taking over the clients of retiring advisers.