Finance professionals expect market abuse to be among regulators’ top priorities in the coming year, a new survey finds.
According to a poll of nearly 300 finance professionals worldwide conducted by consultancy Kinetic Partners, some 37% (and 44% of C-suite executives) saw market abuse as a key issue for regulators. This was ahead of tax-related issues, which were mentioned by 24% of respondents (and 22% of C-suite respondents).
The breakdown of responses by geography indicates that the financial services industry envisions that market abuse will be a key issue globally. More than half (52%) of respondents in the US and over a third (35%) in Hong Kong anticipate that it will be a central area of regulatory focus.
The survey, which was analysed in Kinetic Partners’ annual Global Regulatory Outlook, also found that technology was core to firms’ responses. More than one in five (22%) said their technology investment would concentrate on market and transaction monitoring systems in 2015, putting it behind only regulatory reporting (27%) and anti-money-laundering/know your customer systems (23%).
While issues such as bribery seem to be attracting less regulatory attention (with only 5% of survey respondents expecting regulators to prioritise it), others, such as high-frequency trading (HFT), have risen rather rapidly up the agenda. HFT was fourth on the list of concerns that regulators were expected to focus on, as noted by 17% of respondents overall (and 18% of senior executives), putting it ahead of anti-money laundering.
Commenting on the findings, Simon Appleton, a director at Kinetic Partners in London, said: “Financial services professionals are right to expect regulators to continue to clamp down hard on market abuse, such as insider trading, market manipulation and financial fraud. These already account for many of the fines in key jurisdictions, and the past year has continued to see regulators impose large fines on firms.”