Speaking at this morning’s Wealth Management Association’s Summit 2015 event, Griffith-Jones said he understood the burden of EU and FCA regulation on members, creating issues for compliance, management and systems in equal measure.
“If boards are spending the large majority of their time managing regulatory initiatives, this cannot be a sustainable model for the future,” he said.
With this in mind, he welcomed the European Commission’s proposals to push back the implementation of MiFID II by 12 months.
“From the FCA’s perspective, on the whole, the new directives have merit. Designed through the European process they inevitably contain compromises, but the clear intent is to ensure a sustainable future for global financial services in Europe on a more competitive playing field.”
Griffith-Jones, who has headed up the FCA since April 2013, also stressed wealth managers must take on the responsibility of good conduct themselves: “We cannot ‘do` good conduct on your behalf, as my predecessors have sometimes tried to do”.
He added: “The FCA has 11 principles, and probably 11,000 detailed rules. It is a fact that in all the major enforcement cases we have handled over the past five years the breach committed has related directly to one of our eleven principles.
