Chapter 6 - legal and regulatory enviroment Flashcards
What is the FCA responsible for?
Conduct of business and market issues for ALL firms.
Prudential regulation of SMALL firms (insurance brokerages and financial advisory)
What is the PRA? What is its role?
The PRA sits within the Bank of England. It is responsible for the stability and resolvability of financial institutions (banks, building societies, insurers)
Seeks to ensure businesses can fail without bringing down the financial system
Judgement based approach - looks at business risk, environment, management, government, risk management and liquidity/capital controls
What is the Financial Policy Committee?
Part of the Bank of England.
Responsible for anticipating potential systemic risks to the whole financial system and providing strategic direction for the entire regulatory regime
What is the PRA’s main objective?
Promote the safety and soundness of PRA regulated persons
What are the PRA’s secondary objectives?
Ensuring members behave in a way to promote stability of financial system
Minimise effect one member will have on entire UK financial system
Facilitating competition
What are the PRA’s insurance specific objecives?
Appropriate degree of protection to those who might be a policyholder
Appropriate degree of protection for the reasonable expectations of policyholders as to the distribution of surplus under with profit policies (share in profit or losses or insurer or certain g’tees that increase over lifetime)
What are the PRAs 4 minimum threshold conditions?
Head office + senior management in UK
Prudent conduct of business
Fit and proper staff
Effective supervision
What’s the 3 elements of the PRAs risk assessment framework?
- Potential impact on policyholders
- Macroeconomic and business risk context in which firm operates
- Mitigating factors such as risk management and governance
What is the PRA’s Proactive Intervention Framework PIF?
A supervisory framework used to assess a firm’s proximity to failure (such as liquidity, capital etc)
What’s the role of the Financial Conduct Authority FCA?
Ensure good business conduct
What are the three objectives of the FCA?
Consumer protection
Integrity of the UK financial system
Promote competition
What parts of a business does the FCA look over?
product governance
end to end sales process
prevention of financial crime
What’s the FCA’s approach to regulation?
Early action - intervene early in the lifecycle of a product. Watching over products to ensure they’re innovative and not exploiting consumers.
What’s the FCA’s approach to supervision?
All businesses should base their models around treating customers fairly.
Increasing look at how markets work (sector and market-wide analysis)
How does the FCA define fixed/flexible portfolio firms?
Fixed - highest level of scrutiny, will have a delegated FCA supervisor
Flexible - lower level, reports into a central function first.
What’s the FCA’s three pillar approach to risk?
- Firm systematic framework (treating customers fairly).
- Event driven work (reacts to emerging issues)
- Issues and products
What’s the FCA’s authority if it finds problems?
- Banning products in the retail sector
- Withdrawing misleading promotions
Who does the FCA liaise with?
Both the government and customers directly.
It has panels representing 4 views: consumers, regulated firms, smaller regulated firms, market practitioners.
How do the PRA and FCA work together?
Statutory duty to coordinate
PRA has authority to veto FCA decisions, as UK financial system takes precedence over consumer needs
What are the FCA and PRA’s 10 principles for business (PFB)?
- Integrity
- Skill, care and diligence
- Management and Control
- Financial prudence
- Market conduct
- Customers interestes
- Communication with clients
- Conflicts of interest
- Customers and relationship of trust
- Protection of clients’ assets
- Relationship with regulators
What kind of customer protection does the FCA focus on?
Consumers rather than large commercial clients
What kind of customer protection does the FCA focus on?
Consumers rather than large commercial clients