The recent criticism of the UK Financial Regulator FCA may seem appropriate, or harsh, depending upon your personal perspective, but it gave me food for thought.

Identical twins, they look the same, share the same DNA but they have different fingerprints and personalities.

Musicians being sued for plagiarism although most songs are inspired by those which have come before them.

Numerous financial institutions (FI’s) in the UK plagiarising documents without considering their own risk appetite?

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) state that systems need to be appropriate and proportionate to the nature and scale of the business and that there is no 'one size fits all' approach that they expect firms to adopt. But.... too often I hear of compliance people looking for templates or copies of their counterpart's terms and conditions or policies and procedures so that they can simply ‘find and replace’ the company name throughout the document.

Then there are consultancies offering templates, or documents where just the company name can be inserted, I have seen the same wording in documents amongst numerous companies regardless of their risk appetite.

FI’s are not regulated based on an application of proportionality, there is little dilution of the regulatory requirements.

Would the regulators consider applying a common sense approach to the balance between the different rules that are applicable, the burdens placed upon smaller and less complex financial services and the supervisory oversight applied?

Perhaps Regulators do need a radical overhaul if they are to support rather than stand in the way of UK Financial Services but let’s get it right now before it is too late and UK businesses cannot compete with the rest of Europe or even the world.