← All opinionUnited Kingdom
Regulated by Financial Conduct Authority, Prudential Regulation Authority. Monetary authority: Bank of England.
The regime that governs published opinion here: FSMA section 21 financial promotion restriction — an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity needs approval by an authorised person unless an exemption applies, including the journalism exemption.
Operational resilienceFinOpine desk · 23 Oct 2026
The European Banking Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority have been in contact with Google after a cloud outage took down bank websites. The firms they actually authorise are the banks.
Our viewThe banks, not Google, are the ones regulators authorise, and the decision to put customer services behind one supplier with no tested fallback was theirs. A private call to the vendor produces no public record of how long anyone was locked out.
Financial regulationFinOpine desk · 23 Oct 2026
Dropping annual certification paperwork for 139,000 financial staff is defensible. Deleting their names from the public register — and raising the misconduct reporting threshold in the same package — is a separate decision.
Our viewDropping the annual paperwork for 139,000 staff is defensible. Deleting their names from the public register, while also raising the threshold for reporting misconduct, is not — it removes the evidence that would later show whether this worked.
BankingFinOpine desk · 22 Oct 2026
Hybrid working is compensation in kind. NatWest can withdraw it by instruction because it was never written down as a term — and that is a governance gap, not a management right.
Our viewNot commuting was worth real money to bank staff, and taking it back is a change in pay in everything but name. The problem is that no disclosure a bank makes will ever show it.
PaymentsFinOpine desk · 21 Oct 2026
The competition watchdog wants lower fees and fewer technical barriers for rival wallets on iPhone. Access without control of the button that summons a wallet is a market nobody enters.
Our viewOpening the chip is necessary but nowhere near enough. Unless a rival wallet can be set as the one that opens when you press the side button, access will be technically real and commercially dead.
Financial crimeFinOpine desk · 21 Oct 2026
A bank has published how fast its software can investigate a customer. It has not published how often the software is wrong, or how quickly it lets an innocent person back into their account.
Our viewSpeed is the easiest thing to measure here and the least important. Until Starling publishes how often its software is wrong and how fast it releases innocent customers, 17 seconds tells us about its costs, not its care.
AI and adviceFinOpine desk · 20 Oct 2026
The Financial Conduct Authority is reported to want warning labels on agentic AI that advises consumers. Labels do not change what a service does — and British law regulates the activity, not the branding.
Our viewA warning label does not change what a service does. If an AI agent gives a personal recommendation and then acts on it, British law already treats that as regulated activity, and a disclaimer cannot undo it.
PaymentsFinOpine desk · 19 Oct 2026
The Payment Systems Regulator found that Visa and Mastercard face no competitive constraint when setting UK-EEA interchange fees, proposed a cap, and has not imposed it. The courts are now doing the work instead.
Our viewThe regulator already found these fees are set without competitive constraint and proposed a cap it has not imposed. A £700m court claim is the expensive, slow, leaky substitute for the cheap remedy that was never switched on.
Banking AIFinOpine desk · 16 Oct 2026
Starling says its transaction model will be trained and hosted in a UK sovereign cloud. That is a claim about geography. The question customers should be asking is about consent, and nobody has had to answer it yet.
Our viewKeeping the computers in Britain is worth something, but it answers a question nobody was worried about. What has not been explained is on what basis customers' transaction histories became training material, or whether anyone could say no.
Money marketsFinOpine desk · 15 Oct 2026
The Bank of England's September money market minutes certify calm without publishing a single figure — and a parallel committee records that the Bank is checking whether its data powers still reach the market.
Our viewThe September minutes certify ample liquidity without publishing a single number, while the Bank records elsewhere that it is checking whether its data powers still reach the market. Reassurance is not evidence, and a repo-led framework runs on evidence.
Operational riskFinOpine desk · 13 Oct 2026
Thirty-eight of the UK's biggest banks and market infrastructures spent a day simulating a global cloud failure. The Bank of England says firms should now act on it. It has not said what they found.
Our viewThe rehearsal was the right one to run; the silence afterwards is not. If the Bank can publish bank-by-bank capital stress test results, it can publish what this exercise found and a date by which firms must fix it.
Financial promotionsFinOpine desk · 9 Oct 2026
The Financial Conduct Authority's headline growth rate is the easiest statistic in regulation to produce and the hardest to interpret. Publish the base, the mix and the repeat rate instead.
Our viewA 7,300 per cent rise sounds enormous mainly because the starting point was close to nothing. Until the regulator publishes the base numbers, the mix of serious versus trivial actions, and how many accounts simply come back, the figure measures its own effort rather than any
Financial adviceFinOpine desk · 8 Oct 2026
HSBC is reported to be cutting up to 70 per cent of its UK financial advisers as artificial intelligence takes over. The saving is only real if the duties attached to advice quietly fall away with the advisers.
Our viewIf the software gives personal recommendations, every duty a human adviser carries attaches to it and the savings are smaller than they look. If it does not, customers are losing their right to complain — and nobody has said which it is.
Tax reportingFinOpine desk · 8 Oct 2026
When a platform's software produces the wrong figure, the taxpayer signs for it. Britain's self-assessment system has no clean route to push the cost back where the error was made.
Our viewWise covering the tax bills caused by a data error is the right call, but it is a choice. When a platform's figures are wrong, the tax authority should correct the returns centrally instead of making each customer argue their own case.
Operational resilienceFinOpine desk · 6 Oct 2026
DNB is shrinking its technology teams while expanding its use of AI agents. Nothing in the operational resilience rulebook requires a bank to say how many humans its recovery plan assumes.
Our viewSwapping engineers for autonomous software changes a bank's ability to recover from an outage, not just its cost base. Regulators should make firms re-test their outage plans at the staffing level they will actually have.
Cyber resilienceFinOpine desk · 5 Oct 2026
Andrew Bailey's rebuttal to the Daily Mail sets out the standard the Bank demands of supervised firms — proof through testing — and then asks the public to accept assurance in its place.
Our viewThe Bank tells supervised firms that claiming to be resilient is not enough — they must prove it through testing. Its own defences get a letter to a newspaper saying trust us. That gap should be closed by the Bank's own board.
SettlementFinOpine desk · 2 Oct 2026
A completed pilot proves the plumbing held. It does not prove the payment got faster, cheaper or safer — and the three adjectives in the announcement are claims, not measurements.
Our viewA finished pilot shows the plumbing held, not that payments got faster or cheaper. If Visa and Lloyds want credit for the benefits, they should publish the timings, the costs and the liquidity released.
Merger controlFinOpine desk · 1 Oct 2026
The savings that justify a $6.6bn cash-infrastructure deal come from removing duplicate vans, cash centres and machines. A remedy agreed in a fortnight cannot hold that back.
Our viewTake the long investigation. The savings that make this deal worth $6.6bn come from stripping out duplicate vans, cash centres and machines, and no promise extracted in a fortnight will stop that happening.
Bank ownershipFinOpine desk · 29 Sept 2026
A foreign takeover of a UK deposit-taker is not a private transaction. If the Prudential Regulation Authority approves one, it should publish the conditions it attached — capital, board and operational continuity.
Our viewA foreign owner can buy the profits of a British deposit book, but the guarantee behind those deposits stays here. If regulators approve such a deal, they should publish the conditions they attached to it.
Tokenised depositsFinOpine desk · 28 Sept 2026
UK banks say they have run the first live customer payments in tokenised sterling deposits. The engineering is the easy half. Nobody has published whose promise the token is, or what happens when the issuer fails.
Our viewGetting the first tokenised sterling payment to work is easy; saying whose promise the token is, and whether the deposit compensation scheme covers it, is the part that matters. That paragraph should have been published first.
SettlementFinOpine desk · 25 Sept 2026
The Eurosystem's Pontes puts central bank money behind tokenised trades. Whether that counts as settlement depends on when the cash leg is final, and on who is allowed to hold it.
Our viewSaying tokenised trades settle in central bank money means little until the ECB says when the cash leg becomes final and who may hold it. If the euro side keeps business hours, private tokens will keep the nights and weekends.
Market structureFinOpine desk · 23 Sept 2026
The Bank of England has let a clearing house also run the ownership record for tokenised securities. Those two jobs were separated on purpose, and the sandbox should say how they are being kept apart.
Our viewLetting one firm both guarantee trades and keep the ownership record undoes a separation that exists for good reason. The Bank should say plainly how the two halves are walled off, and when the permanent rules arrive.
Tax lawFinOpine desk · 15 Sept 2026
A percentage ceiling floats with room prices, so it is an index rather than a limit. The decision worth arguing about is whether boroughs may each choose their own instrument.
Our viewFive per cent of a room rate is a moving target, not a ceiling. The choice worth legislating is not the cap but whether London gets one instrument and one taxable base instead of borough-by-borough improvisation.
Market plumbingFinOpine desk · 3 Sept 2026
The Bank of England has pushed back its November 2026 RTGS standards release. Slipping a date in shared infrastructure is often the right call — but only if the replacement date and the reason land with it.
Our viewDelaying a payments standards update is usually the right call — a broken release is far worse than a late one. But a delay is only half an announcement. The new date and the reason are the other half.
Financial regulationFinOpine desk · 2 Sept 2026
A Code of Practice for "systemic" stablecoin issuers has nobody in it until the Bank names someone. Publishing the rules was the easy part. Publishing the trigger, and the runway, is the part that matters.
Our viewRules that bite only once a stablecoin is declared systemic arrive after the risk does. The Bank should publish now what makes an issuer systemic, and how long it gets to comply once it is told.
PaymentsFinOpine desk · 27 Aug 2026
Mastercard, Visa and Revolut challenged the PSR's power to cap card fees and lost. Three months later the Treasury confirmed the body would be folded into the FCA. Its powers survive. The question is whether the appetite does.
Our viewEvery legal power transfers across. What does not transfer is appetite — a body with one job behaves differently from one with twenty. The fee work will quietly slow, and nothing in the law will show it happening.