Today’s post looks at the recent headlines garnered by the (relatively) massive fines being given to serious corporate players by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the U.K. This marks a drastic change in approach, as we shall see, and that may be down to the adoption of an American creation known as a ‘Deferred Prosecution Agreement’ (hereafter DPA), which has already been discussed in Financial Regulation Matters . The focus of the post is to show how the SFO is becoming a genuinely powerful and influential regulator for the financial sector and, ultimately, that it must be supported in its endeavours, because of its capabilities to reduce transgressions via the only (unfortunately) palatable form of correction. The SFO has been in the business headlines recently because of a number of high-profile agreements that have been reached under the possibilities afforded by the adoption of the DPA. A DPA became a tool for the SFO in the U.K. in 2014, and was introduced to the arsenal ...

Continuing the coverage of the U.K.’s largest banking institutions revealing their financial positions, which has included RBS , HSBC , and Lloyds so far, this short post will use the financial report from Barclays, which was released today , to make a point about a theme that is developing amongst the most important banks around the world. During a report on the release of the figures, Barclays’ Chairman, John McFarlane, stated that although the results were very good for the bank, it still faced challenges because ‘ a number of potentially material legacy conduct matters need to be resolved at acceptable cost ’, by which he is referring to a number of investigations by regulatory bodies in to the bank’s conduct surrounding the Crisis. For this post, the focus will be on this continued use of the word ‘legacy’, which denotes a different era to the current era of banking – the issue for this post is that the era in question was only 10 years ago, and multiple infractions continue ...