Of those retail bank human resource directors surveyed, 67% said they would be hiring more staff to cope with the transition from the FSA to its replacements, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA), which come into being on 1 April 2013.
According to BrightPool, not a single respondent said the change would lead to a reduction in compliance and risk jobs in retail banks, in a sign that the break-up of the FSA is adding to the staffing cost of regulation for the banks.
Angela Hickmore, managing director at BrightPool, said: “Banks are concerned that having two financial services regulators rather than one means dealing with more incoming regulatory requests from the regulators.
“The potential downside of breaking up the FSA is a big increase in compliance staffing costs in financial services.
“Banks also expect the focus to be deeper on both prudential and conduct issues because the new regulators have specific remits. This all adds up to more need for compliance and other staff to cope with the workload.”
Some banks are also planning operational changes to make sure their prudential reporting is watertight when the dedicated prudential regulator comes into being, said Hickmore.
“The banks are looking for project managers to make sure that information produced by their different operational units, including compliance, audit, risk and treasury, all feed into their management information as efficiently as possible.”
“The retail banks are so big that it is very difficult to make sure that there are no gaps or overlaps between the different operational business units. The break-up of the FSA has put this under the spotlight.”
BrightPool said highly rated internal audit staff with strong commercial experience are in some cases seeing salary increases of 20% because they are in such high demand at the banks.
“A lot of the headlines about job trends in banks are about redundancies, but changes retail banks are making in the wake of the financial crisis are also creating a lot of new job requirements for roles that have become increasingly important,” Hickmore said.
