Forward thinking

Reporting by Timon Molloy.

“We ain’t seen nothing yet and come May it could well be all change.” Switching to New Labour terminology, Rob Moulton, Head of Financial Services at Nabarro, noted “shifts in the tectonic plates,” when CM met him at the firm’s Holborn office. One piece of the regulatory landscape has already broken away with Hector Sants’ resignation. The FSA chief executive may have been working to a three-year plan but Moulton suggests other possible explanations: “Hants has been in charge of an organisation that’s come in for a lot of criticism, which is often why the top man leaves. And the FSA has been threatened with break-up, another reason that CEOs often depart.” His decision might be seen as one more example of how changes start to happen ahead of any formal announcement of a new structure. Moulton is sure that financial services regulatory reform will be a “big issue” for the Conservatives if they win in May, “The tectonic plates will then move very quickly as they pin all the failures on Gordon Brown.” He thinks people will be surprised at how high up the Conservatives’ agenda the subject will be after more than a decade out of office; in this at least they will be following New Labour, who set about creating the FSA as soon as they entered office in 1997.