Legal Business

‘Like Scotland leaving the UK’: Bank ring-fencing reforms herald big changes

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Further proposals for banking reform issued last month by the Bank of England are expected to cause significant internal restructuring of in-house legal teams, with some banks effectively having two separate legal functions.

Under the reforms, banks with core deposits greater than £25bn, including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander UK and The Co-operative Bank, will from 2019 need to separate their retail banking function from the rest of their group, which will divide the activities in the legal team. Banks are currently in a transitional phase of determining where the line is drawn between retail banking and investment banking operations.