EU and UK perform a product governance two-step

The European Union and United Kingdom have stolen each other's ideas and even worked together on product interventions - a dynamic that continues after Brexit. Writing to a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love, Adam Samuel chronicles the EU and UK's "peculiar intellectual romance on the product governance compliance scene".

Adam SamuelBA LLM DipPFS MCISI FCIArb Certs CII (MP&ER) Barrister and Attorney may be contacted atadamsamuel@aol.com.For links to where you can buy the second edition of 'Consumer Financial Services Complaints and Compensation', see www.adamsamuel.com/book.

Product governance may have been the UK's last gift to European financial services regulation. At the end of the millennium, the subject seems to have emerged in Britain from the discussions surrounding the management of with-profit funds and the difficulties of Equitable Life. It blossomed with the extension of regulation from the conduct of investment business to investment products in October 2001. Through the Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) initiative that sprang from the 2001 change, product governance appeared to come into some form of bloom in the shape of the Responsibilities of Product Providers and Distributors (RPPD) in 2007.