The UK’s top banking supervisor yesterday said the Bank of England had to “defend” any moves to weaken financial regulations.
Sam Woods, a deputy governor of the Bank of England and head of the Prudential Regulatory Authority, which oversees the banking sector, made the comments while visiting Dundee yesterday.
He said the Bank of England had spent much of the past decade introducing reforms and now a “big job” to protect the new measures.
He said: “We’ve basically spent the last decade going through a massive overhaul of the financial system, in particular the banking system and also insurance.
“We’ve just reached the end of that process and we are now looking forward.
“Firstly, the history of financial crisis is that you have a financial crisis, there are a lot of reforms and gradually the reforms get eaten away and then there’s another crisis.
“We do not want that happening on our watch.
“We’ve got a big job to do to defend what we’ve put in place.
“We need to look at carefully for people who are trying to work their way around the rules.”
Mr Woods said that Brexit and improving the resilience of financial firms’ technology were the other two areas of focus for the Bank.
“There’s been a huge amount of work on Brexit and around 95% of that work has been on mitigating the risk to financial services in the event of a disorderly cliff edge exit,” he said.
“The good news is that in financial services, compared to other sectors, you can mitigate a lot of the risks. That’s been a massive project for us.
“The third thing is a whole bunch of effort relating to technology.
“As banks close branches and more and more of us access banking online, it becomes more important that banks’ IT systems and apps work well tolerably close to all the time.”
Mr Woods said the Bank was working on new regulations for the resilience of financial institutions’ IT systems, due to come into force next summer.
The leading civil servant was in Dundee as part of a series of engagement exercises held by the Bank, to hear about economic issues from people directly.
He ran a citizens’ panel in Glasgow on Monday night and a community forum with a dozen representatives from voluntary groups at the V&A yesterday.
He also met representatives from Dundee youth work organisation Hot Chocolate Trust and gave a talk to pupils at Harris Academy yesterday.
The Bank of England has started the search for its next governor, with Mark Carney due to step down at the end of January.
When asked if he would apply for the top job, Mr Woods replied: “I’ve got my hands absolutely full with my current job and that’s what I’m focused on.”
rmclaren@thecourier.co.uk