Oxford Saïd collaborated with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to enhance its senior leaders’ capabilities to navigate the increasingly complex financial services and regulatory environment.
Innovations, such as big data and blockchain, are transforming financial services. However, as well as bringing competition, choice and convenience, they also create new dangers. Growing complexity, cybercrime and fraud threaten the integrity of the global financial system, while rising household debt and uncertainty in employment continue to test consumer confidence.
Mitigating these risks is a significant task for regulators worldwide. As the organisation responsible for regulating financial markets and more than 59,000 financial services firms in the UK, after Brexit, the FCA faces the added challenge of disentangling the country’s financial regulations from Europe’s.
In 2017, the regulator embarked on an organisational transformation to deliver the future of financial regulation. It refreshed its mission and values, moved into a new purpose-built headquarters in Stratford, London, and invested in new cloud-based IT systems to encourage more collaborative working. However, it knew its success rested on implementing a bold new approach to leadership development.
More than 110 of the FCA’s senior leaders already had industry-leading technical expertise. The challenge was to enhance their capabilities to navigate the increasingly volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) financial and regulatory environment.
The regulator needed a partner capable of developing a flexible leadership programme which was responsive to its evolving priorities and would engage time-pressured people to commit to personal growth.
Combining faculty knowledge from one of the world’s most prestigious universities with a diverse, innovative team of executive education professionals, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School offered the FCA the change-catalysing intervention it needed.