Regulation is a word bankers love to hate.
But according to Sebastian Dovey, managing partner of wealth management consultancy Scorpio Partnership, they need to spend less time moaning about it and more time working with regulators to communicate the benefits of the industry.
“It’s not good enough to sit back and say this is going to cost us,” he says. “We’re here now, we’re in this mess. We’ve got to try and manage our way out of it.
“Bankers are always complaining about regulation and saying that’s the reasons for costs … It’s the wrong statement to make to say regulation is not necessarily going to help our business.”
While protecting an industry dedicated to making money for the most wealthy in society may be a tough political sell at the moment, Dovey suggests the industry talks to regulators about what the industry really does, how big it is and how important it is for incomes and jobs.
This sounds like sensible advice. Because when the current crisis is finally over, it looks less like a question of if and more like a question of how much regulation will come.
2 comments so far
This is a time for real inovation. The big bank theory
- Posted by Clyde Prestonand hedge funds will collapse. The Federal Government
will make this worse and it will take people who understand basic cash flow control.
Banks and hedge funds will have to adapt their models to a new, lower-leverage world. But regulation, in whatever form it comes, will not necessarily work against them in the long-term if it keeps their businesses on a sensible footing.
- Posted by Laurence Fletcher