Kevin Okell: Drowning in rules

300 million pages of regulation by 2020

clock • 2 min read

Without a sea change in the attitude of governments as to how actively they intervene in business activity, warns Kevin Okell, there is a real danger innovation in financial services will drown in a sea of red tape

According to Thomson Reuters, the group's regulatory intelligence service captured 52,506 regulatory alerts from more than 750 regulatory bodies across the globe in 2016. That is more than 200 updates a day. While ‘only' a fifth of these were from the UK and Europe, in an increasingly global market it is dangerous to assume the rest can be ignored - remember the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, better known as ‘FATCA'? Add in the red tape associated with employing people, managing a workplace, buying materials or publishing anything and the challenge of running a business looks positi...

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