On 22 January 2020, Norton Rose Fulbright’s corporate financial services and government relations practices, in cooperation with the City of London Corporation, organised a panel debate on “The finalisation of the Basel III reforms in a post-Brexit environment: single or dual-track approach?”. Hosted in Norton Rose Fulbright’s Brussels office, the event gathered over 75 participants, representing various sectors of the financial services industry – including a number of the firm’s clients – as well as representatives of European Union institutions and Member States. The keynote address was delivered by Paulina Dejmek-Hack, Deputy Head of the EU Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom (European Commission), who focused on discussing the Commission’s approach to post-31 January 2020 relations with the UK, including both short-term and medium to long-term perspectives. In the subsequent panel debate, hosted under the Chatham House rules and joined, alongside Paulina, by James Chew, Group Head Regulatory Strategy (HSBC), Matt Holmes, Managing Director Government and Regulatory Affairs (Deutsche Bank) and moderated by Jonathan Herbst (Norton Rose Fulbright), the panellists agreed on the need of a balanced approach to the Basel III standard implementation in both jurisdictions. Acknowledging that divergences and national discretions are inherent features of the Basel III framework, the panellists accepted that there will likely be differences in the way that the final standard is implemented in EU and UK laws but this does not have to result in adverse consequences for the industry. A lot of time in the panel debate and the subsequent Q&A session with the audience was devoted to discussing the impact of this parallel implementation of Basel III in the UK and the EU on the future equivalence assessment by the European Commission of the UK legal and regulatory framework. Finally, with the panellists agreeing that well-functioning supervisory cooperation is critical to the banking sector, they noted that Brexit is expected to fundamentally change the nature of cooperation and this change should not be underestimated.