With over £15 trillion in domestic banking assets and 170 foreign banks operating here, the UK is a leading global centre for cross-border banking. But this scale and diversity come with significant challenges.
The video provides insights on how retail banks can navigate regulatory requirements, manage risk, and plan for the future, while protecting consumers and maintaining market stability.
The Banks sub-sector is significant in our approach to the Financial Services Restructuring market.
Within this sub-sector we include high street lenders, internation banks, other foreign lenders, challenger, Neo and digital banks plus the UK building societies.
Why do we believe it appropriate to align our skill set and offerings to this subsector?
The UK is the leading center of cross-border banking, 170 foreign banks within the UK market.
The Domestic Banking market is significant with over £15 trillion in banks alone, leading to a highly competitive landscape, impacting service offerings, pricing and risk in acquisition and origination.
The market faces several challenges via product offerings that are in themselves facing legal scrutiny. Such as motor finance, premium finance, certain credit products to consumers like buy now pay later, and short term high-cost types of lending.
The UK is the most highly regulated Financial Services markets in the world, with our regulators monitoring and introducing policy to ensure the overall health of banks including capital in the institution, appropriate risk management and lines of defense, operational resilience, capability to plan and carry out a winddown of the whole or part of the institution without placing the market at risk and protecting the consumers by alignment to Consumer Duty regulation and taking action to deal with complaints and compensate where required. The regulation places heavy responsibilities on senior management, certainly in the eyes of the regulator and our clients, they have acknowledged they do not always hold the necessary skill sets to support independent assessment of certain information relevant to the type of work we do.
Our offerings and skills support within subsectors across the spectrum of Restructuring Advisory and Insolvency offerings.
Where can we be engaged on? Regulatory requirements, resolution and winddown planning, solvent exit analysis and assurance services, support to safeguarding requirements, other advisory support, operational resilience and stress testing analysis, book run-offs and managed exits with back-up service facilitation all in-house, stressed and distressed, financial advisor roles to support the recovery of lenders, cashflow monitoring and modelling, asset recovery support, diligence to portfolio sales, contingency planning for an insolvency appointment and acting as insolvency practitioner for banks under a special administration or resolution regime.
UK insurances market is the largest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. Employing circa 300,000 individuals, with a 3rd of those directly by insurers and the rest in markets, attached such as broking.
The Market is broken into separate subsectors of insurance carriers and reinsurers, insurance intermediaries such as brokers and MGAs and premium finance providers.
This subsector is facing many challenges. It is a highly regulated market and the restructuring and insolvency tools required for this subsector have changed materially since the financial crisis and the introduction of comprehensive regulation and the improvements in risk management practices, as well as the adaptation of reforms driven from bank failures.
The insurance landscape is rapidly evolving, with operational, regulatory and investment risks constantly changing. Insurance firms are navigating an unpredictable geopolitical climate, economic uncertainty and climate change impacts. AI and data analytics are integral to remaining competitive, as is the speed of response to regulation expectations and stress and destress.
Key priorities for regulation include appropriate wind down planning and by the end of June of 2026, insurers will need to have solvent exit analysis in place. Equally, currently relevant is the FCA’s consultation on premium finance and fair value to the consumer, plus the use of discretionary commission products.
How can we in financial services restructuring and insolvency support the insurance subsectors?
Insurance carriers and re-insurers, we can offer the following types of support: insolvency advisory for carrier failure as well as the advisory support in relation to investments held, and for solvent exit analysis and solvent corporate eliminations, we work with the company in relation to leading to it and Members Voluntary Liquidation. We also supply to subrogated claim support.
For insurance intermediaries, meaning brokers and MGA’s, we help with advisory and insolvency support in distressed situations and help with wind down planning, with reviews, fire drills and where there is regulatory intervention via a S166 review, we help with the restructuring support.
For premium finance providers, we offer advisory and insolvency support in distressed situations, we work with corporates looking to redress and remediate consumers. We support wind down planning reviews and for regulatory intervention via s166 reviews, we use our restructuring toolkit to support the corporate.
Our financial services restructuring and insolvency team is well experienced to help you in these matters.
For more guidance, get in touch with Chris Laverty.
