Aims and objectives
The FSA is a statutory body set up under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. The Act sets out our four statutory objectives which are supported by a set of principles of good regulation which we must have regard to when discharging our functions.
The FSA has set out its aims for 2005/06 under three broad headings:
- promoting efficient orderly and fair markets;
- helping retail consumers achieve a fair deal; and
- improving our business capability and effectiveness
Details of these aims can be found in the FSA's Business Plan.
Regional Governance
During the latter half of 2005, we have reviewed the regional governance arrangements of those global investment banks with a significant presence in the UK. This work is in line with our practice of doing in-depth work on significant thematic issues across a peer group of firms to draw out common themes of interest to firms and ourselves. This issue was selected because of the importance we place in general on the effectiveness of a firm's governance arrangements and, in particular for overseas based firms, how their regional governance arrangements ensure that business is run in a controlled way in the region.
Governance is a wide and complex subject and our visits were not audits or a formal assessment of the control and compliance environment; rather they were of a high level nature and focussed on determining the various models of regional governance deployed by these firms.
The results of this work were discussed at a roundtable on 21 November 2005. We explained our overall approach to this work as follows:
- We recognise that firms have developed various regional governance models and practices to meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders - one best practice model does not exist.
- Our visits have helped to develop a framework that summarises what regional governance is and what it should deliver.
- Our visits also identified some issues that impact on the overall effectiveness of governance although none of these were of sufficient seriousness for the firms we visited to be operating below our minimum standards.
- We have developed a set of ten questions designed to encapsulate the key aspects of regional governance.
- We anticipate ongoing engagement with the industry on this subject with a particular focus on the effectiveness of individual firm's governance arrangements.
Although this work was undertaken in relation to the peer group of global investment banks, the overall approach and our findings will also be of interest to a wider group of firms who are domiciled overseas but have presences in the UK or are UK based but have significant presences overseas. So have published a presentation containing the results to date of our work.