On 4 December 2025, the Bank of England (BoE) launched its second system-wide exploratory scenario (SWES) exercise.

This latest SWES exercise will focus on how the private markets ecosystem operates under stress and the potential implications for UK financial stability and the UK real economy. The BoE will seek to get a better understanding of how banks and non-banks active in private markets would respond to a severe but plausible global downturn, how their actions interact at a system level, and whether these interactions can amplify stress across the financial system and pose risks to UK financial stability and the provision of finance to the UK real economy.

The exercise will consist of two rounds, enabling system-wide interactions and amplification effects to be accounted for, including by updating firms on the behaviours of other firms and any consequences of that, as well as testing key sensitivities.

Most of the exercise will be completed in 2026, with a final report published in early 2027.