(Bloomberg) -- UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has invited top executives from the country’s six biggest lenders to a meeting later this week to discuss a slate of new bank capital rules.
The meeting will come after the UK announces its final plans for implementing the last phase of post-crisis reforms on Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter. In addition to the chief executives, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey and Sam Woods, the head of the central bank’s regulatory arm, are also expected to attend, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing non-public information.
Finance executives across London have been on edge for months as regulators around the world have deliberated how and when they plan to implement the new rules. Barclays Plc CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan said Monday he’s communicated to regulators in the UK and the US that his hope is “we have roughly the same amount of capital for a particular type of business and it happens at roughly the same timing.”
“So far, we’ve seen nothing to the contrary, but we are all glued to the telephone to see that we get that,” Venkatakrishnan said.
Woods, for his part, has vowed that the measures will be “faithful” to rules agreed by international policymakers in 2017. UK banks fear this will put them at a competitive disadvantage to rivals in Europe, which has unveiled a much weaker package, and the US, which is set to halve its proposed capital hike, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
Representatives for the six banks which are expected to send a delegate to the meeting — a list that includes HSBC Holdings Plc, Barclays, NatWest Group Plc, Lloyds Banking Group Plc, Nationwide Building Society and Banco Santander SA’s UK arm — either did not respond or declined to comment. Spokespeople for the central bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority and the Treasury also declined to comment.
The BOE is planning to postpone its adoption of the capital rules until January 2026 at the earliest so that its timelines will better align with other international jurisdictions, Bloomberg previously reported. The EU has already announced a delay to implementing the most internationally relevant part of the package — the rules that deal with banks’ markets businesses — until 2026.
The rules, agreed under the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, were originally due to be introduced globally in 2022. Most jurisdictions’ implementation plans include lengthy phase-in periods, which likely means the package won’t be fully in force globally until after 2030.
--With assistance from William Shaw, Jan-Henrik Förster, Aisha S Gani, Harry Wilson and Leonard Kehnscherper.
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