Covid-19: The UK financial regulator’s response

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented a new set of challenges to regulators and the regulated alike. It’s safe to say that most crisis-management scenarios the UK regulators had previously stress-tested had not envisaged a lengthy period of time during which the vast majority of businesses could not operate at all, and those that could would largely be doing so with employees working from their own homes so far as possible. No matter how good a disaster recovery system and remote-working capabilities a financial institution may have had, it would be unlikely to have envisaged not returning to any form of office environment for months, let alone the sustained problems its customer base would face. So the regulators had to step up to give firms guidance on how they expected them to behave in trying circumstances which would see many of their customers facing financial difficulties. In this article, Emma Radmore of Womble Bond Dickinson looks at what the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) have been doing.