Future of Financial Services

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I take on board my noble friend’s comments. In relation to flood defences, I must declare an interest: my farm runs down to the sea and I have some three miles of coast, which is under continual attack by the elements. But we have increased the commitment of funding for flood defences; I think it was in the Budget in March, and it certainly recognised that this is a major element of our national infrastructure. In terms of seeing an allocation into these kind of assets, this falls partly into the previous question about ensuring that we get a wider allocation into infrastructure and of course into sea defence and indeed flood defence.

[Viscount Waverley (CB) [V]]

My Lords, if fluency in fintech will define the future prosperity of the UK, policy alignment and regulatory equivalence are essential with the EU and global counterparties. Does the Minister agree that a key goal is to encourage digital trade, and then to help our SMEs access global markets? I refer to my declaration in the register. The range of financial interventions from Governments and regulators has expanded in an unco-ordinated fashion, underlining the need to strengthen regulatory co-operation. What incentives and assistance will be available to promote standardisation, reusability and rationalisation of technology to standardise taxonomies, document digitalisation, implementation of distributed ledger technology and artificial intelligence?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, we absolutely acknowledge the role of fintech in the economy. It generated some £11 billion in 2019 and employed more than 76,000 people. The 2020 report has highlighted the UK as a global leader. Likewise, in the payments landscape, we are also highly innovative because we again are a large economy. In 2018, more than 230,000 faster payments were sent every hour, compared to fewer than 3,000 10 years earlier. The noble Viscount is concerned about regulation. The financial regulators continue to provide a platform that facilitates innovation in this space. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority has accepted a significant number of DLT-based projects into its regulatory sandbox to enable the adoption of this technology to deliver better financial services with appropriate consumer safeguards.