April 2021

On 26 April 2021, the FCA published a speech by Mark Steward (Executive Director of Enforcement and Market Oversight, FCA) entitled Compliance, Culture and Evolving Regulatory Expectations.

Highlights in the speech include:

  • The Senior Managers Regime (SMR) has changed the way firms allocate responsibilities, align those responsibilities to relevant controls and ensure

On 26 April 2021, there was published on the legislation.gov.uk website a draft of the Payment and Electronic Money Institution Insolvency Regulations 2021 together with a draft explanatory memorandum.

The draft statutory instrument creates a new special administration regime for payment and electronic money institutions (pSAR). The existing special administration regime for investment

Once relegated to the fringe of the crypto/FinTech communities, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have recently exploded to the forefront of modern pop culture and are taking on an ever increasing number of forms—from collectible digital kittens, to sport highlights, to music albums, to pieces of art auctioned off by Christie’s for US $69.3 million.

But what,

On Monday 26 April 2021, ESMA published a press release confirming that it is in the final stages of  the process of assessing applications received from prospective Securitisation Repositories under the Securitisation Regulation (Regulation EU 2017/2402). Within 40 working days ESMA is obliged to finalise its assessment of the applications made by a prospective Securitisation

On 26 April 2021, the UK government announced a number of designations under its new global anti-corruption sanctions regime, which is designed to stop “those involved in serious corruption from entering and channelling money through the UK” (see press release).

Under the Global Anti-Corruption Sanctions Regulations 2021 (SI 2021 No. 488) the

On 23 April 2021, the FCA published a speech by its chair, Charles Randell, entitled ‘Cautious optimism for the post-pandemic world’.

Highlights in the speech include:

  • Firms must identify if consumers are trapped in a cycle of unaffordable debt and take action to break that cycle, such as forbearance, support and referral to appropriate

On 23 April 2021, the Working Group on Sterling Risk-Free Reference Rates issued a statement setting out a range of considerations intended to help market participants, across GBP bond, loan and derivative markets, assess and prioritise the active transition of legacy GBP LIBOR contracts to SONIA. For derivative market participants who may rely on ISDA’s

On 23 April 2021, the Bank of England (BoE) updated its webpage regard stress testing by adding further items regarding its 2021 Climate Biennial Exploratory Scenario. In particular the BoE has published:

The prosecution of two former Serco executives by the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) collapsed earlier today after failures in the SFO’s disclosure process.

The SFO applied to adjourn the trial – which began on 30 March – in order to resolve those issues, but the application was refused and the jury was directed to