Financial Services Execs Warm To Regulation — Seriously

Must financial executives and the regulators who regulate them always be at odds? Perhaps not, says a new study.

The Wall Street Journal said Wednesday (Jan. 27) that some executives in the financial industry may be moving toward not being as “relentlessly negative” on regulations, as they have been in the not-too-distant past.

That’s one of the key findings via Duff & Phelps in its “Global Regulatory Outlook 2016.” In that report, a significant number of the 193 respondents (all of them hailing from finance), or 42 percent of them, said that they think regulations would have ultimately “little or no effect” on making the financial industry more stable on a global basis and that number is in itself less than the 54 percent who stated the same sentiment three years ago. In fact, about 40 percent of the executives said they believed that regulation would help stabilize the industry, which is a big leap over the 30 percent seen in 2013. And, in another indirect measure of acceptance of regulation, the study found that only 14 percent think regulations would make financial services less stable on the whole, which is a drop from the 16 percent seen in 2013.

In the words of Duff & Phelps’ global head of compliance and regulation, writing in the report: “The industry’s opinion on the impact of regulation continues to soften year on year,” said Julian Korek, though” significant ambivalence remains.”

[bctt tweet=”Financial execs cast a wary eye toward 2016 and regulation.”]

In other stats, the percentage of executives who said that regulation would bolster and support consumer confidence was 31 percent in the most recent data, off from 43 percent in last year’s survey. Only 6 percent said there’s enough regulation in place to ward off a crash in the system.