My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening and a very warm welcome to the Guildhall for the UK Finance Annual Dinner. 

And a particular thank you to EY, again our sponsor for the evening.

Tulip - congratulations once more on your appointment as City Minister – we are delighted you are our Minister and that you are here. I sensed immediately when we first met that we could make a lot of progress together. Indeed you, David and I have worked closely whilst you were shadow City Minister, in creating Labour’s Economic Vision launched at our offices prior to the election, and since your appointment. You quickly recognised that we are not a sector just to be regulated and taxed but are in fact the government’s key delivery partner for many major public policy interventions. We look forward to supporting your efforts to allow more appropriate risk back into the system as we seek to rebalance regulation for growth.

Every year in the seven I have been doing this job, I have naively expected a slightly quieter year ‘next year’. But the ups and downs of the Brexit process, Covid, Ukraine, inflation and market turmoil, the cost-of-living crisis, US and Swiss bank failures, and most recently an election, meant no quieter year. 

Tonight, I want to do three things. Celebrate the management, and indeed the whole team, at UK Finance on how brilliantly I think they have risen to these challenges. Talk about the increasing importance of our international work. And finally, identify key future opportunities and priorities.

Every year UK Finance asks our members how they rate us, our employees how they see us, and last year we asked a wider group of policymakers, regulators and journalists how they rank us. I am delighted to say we score consistently well into the upper 90s out of a hundred with our members, similarly highly with our employees (ranking as we do in the top 25 business service companies to work for in the UK), and stakeholders said we were the most influential trade body in the UK with a score almost twice that of the nearest competitor. You can rest assured though that we don’t take any of this for granted and will remain vigilant in delivering value and being effective for you.  

Our success is down to the fact that we have a very collaborative Chief Executive and thanks to him, a better and better executive committee and wider team who work quietly behind the scenes to garner your views and seek to influence policymakers, always data based and evidence led. And of course, I thank our board of 20 chief executives and the countless members who sit on our committees, giving hours of detailed thinking to shape the advocacy we do on your behalf. 

Looking at the scoreboard this year, I think David, to use a sporting analogy, has out batted even Joe Root….., and the team collectively have leapt to the top of the premier league with their policy wins. Under David’s leadership, we have consistently argued that the UK needs to rebalance regulation for growth. That regulators needed effective guidance and scrutiny over their implementation of the secondary competitiveness objective. We said that the FOS needed reforming, that the PSR and Pay.UK needed a new approach to restore the innovation and global leadership we once had in payments, that the early fraud reimbursement proposals needed a radical rethink, that we needed to be very careful how the consumer duty was implemented to avoid more financial exclusion and unpredictable look backs further reducing UK bank investability, that we need the tech sector to partner with us in fraud prevention, that open banking needed to be commercial, and that the UK should issue a digital gilt. These ideas are all now broadly government policy.

So tonight, I thank David and the management team for a stellar year. And warn them, I have a distinct feeling next year won’t be any quieter!

Turning briefly to UK Finance’s international work, David and I have this year represented our members at meetings of the European Banking Federation, the International Banking Federation and the IMF and IIF. Our team also again attended COP. Since some of our sector’s regulation and standards are set globally, UK Finance could not be a world class trade association, or an effective advocate for the sector, if we didn’t have input to the Financial Stability Board, the Basel Committee and other global organisations like IOSCO and Interpol. We spread best practice developed in the UK and learn from our international colleagues. The similarity between the issues national trade bodies face is striking, and the themes emerging for this year are fighting economic crime and “past peak regulation”, or “how to reset regulation for growth”. This reflects a global realisation by governments that regulation needs to allow the growth necessary for nations to repay their record debt burdens.

I agree with the Chancellor and Governor that we also need to stay closely in touch with the EU, but partly in my view to counter any protectionist tendencies they may have and ensure we continue to champion open and global trade, particularly in financial services. Thinking of my recent visits to India and Brazil, I see how radically technology is going to fundamentally transform our industry and how these countries have swept past others with ambitious national visions and effective public private partnerships. Keeping abreast of, and closer to, the geographic markets of the future must therefore be another theme of our international work. In summary, our international work will become even more important as DLT and digital tokenisation take hold, since they will blur national boundaries and require international interoperability and global standards. 

Turning to the third topic. If the UK is to retain its global leadership position in financial services, we need to see announced government policies quickly executed, and Tulip as I mentioned at Mansion House, I would add three further priorities. Firstly, embrace not just a digital gilt, but digital tokenisation with all the benefits of speed, efficiency and access to new asset classes it can bring consumers. And the enhanced international standing it can bring to our capital markets. The government and regulators have already made substantive reforms to improve our capital markets’ competitiveness, but we must maintain momentum. A more agile and flexible approach will be required to delivering the UK’s infrastructure needs if we are to seize the opportunities offered by next generation technologies. We fully support the UK government’s Payments Vision and the related Delivery Group through which we will work to create the infrastructure required to deliver the vision.  We have laid the foundations in our work on the Regulated Liability Network project, and call for rapid further progress through our sector working closely with HMT and the Bank.  Secondly, we need to recognise that we won’t realise the benefits of digital tokenisation, including new forms of digital money, without digital identity. Our industry still has time to coalesce around an electronic identity construct that could safeguard the sectors’ customer relationships, bring so much convenience to consumers and reduce costs for our sector, most notably in fraud prevention and detection. Finally, in relation to the regulation of AI, the UK needs to continue to chart a clever path between the likely over liberal approach of the US and over burdensome approach of the EU. We need to regulate smartly to foster innovation and gain the benefits of AI, whilst protecting the system and consumers against the worst risks. 

Tulip, building on your existing promising policy announcements, your government can help the UK be a world leader in all these areas, but it will require bold thinking, determined execution and close partnership. 

UK Finance will continue to set out what we think you need to do to drive the UK’s international competitiveness and growth. We look forward to partnering with you to drive progress and support you for success in any way we can.

Thank you, Tulip, and all of you for being here tonight, we look forward to what you have to say Minister and I hope you all enjoy the rest of the evening.