The UK will exceed a government target of getting 15 new banks into the market over the next five years to help to boost competition, the country’s top financial markets regulator has said.<\/p>\n
The Conservative Government, elected last month, set this target to challenge the so-called \u201cBig Four\u201d banks, HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, which dominate the market for retail customer accounts.<\/p>\n
Martin Wheatley, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), told a financial conference: \u201cWe expect that to be achieved. We expect that to be exceeded.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past two years, 14 new banks have been authorised and a further 20 are now in the early stages of seeking authorisation, Mr Wheatley said.<\/p>\n
But he also said introducing new banks to the market was not purely a \u201cnumbers game\u201d and that having a very large number of banks, such as the 700 banks that currently operate in Italy, was probably not a good thing for customers.<\/p>\n
Adding some new entrants, increasing innovation in banking services, and being a \u201creferee\u201d to ensure customers are put first, were the FCA\u2019s key to improving competition, he said.<\/p>\n
The watchdog has also given advice to about 100 so-called fintech firms, many of them based in London\u2019s Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub.<\/p>\n
Some of these businesses want to offer services in cyber currencies or make it easier for people to open a bank account when they move to another country, Mr Wheatley said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UK will exceed a government target of getting 15 new banks into the market over the next five years to help to boost competition, the country’s top financial markets regulator has said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":802,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions\/802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}