Government to launch New Bank Start-Up Unit

The plan, launched by the Chancellor and the Secretary for Business, Sajid Javid, will also take steps to help consumers find the best bank for them.

The PRA and the FCA will launch their New Bank Start-Up Unit on 20 January 2016. The new Unit will have a dedicated website, and will provide firms with named case officers at both the PRA and FCA to give dedicated supervisory resource to assist new banks to enter the market and through the early days of authorisation.

Between May 2010 and May 2015, eight new UK banks were authorised by the regulators compared to just one new authorisation of a UK bank in the preceding five year period.

By making the process of becoming a bank easier and more efficient, the New Bank Start-Up Unit aims to help the government’s ambition of 15 new bank licences this Parliament.

The government said that good progress is already being made, with Atom Bank securing their authorisation in June of this year and several more banks in the pipeline.

The government is also taking steps to engage consumers in banking to boost demand and competition. It will deliver an open Application Programming Interface standard in UK banking to help Financial Technology companies make use of bank data on behalf of customers, to provide a range of value-added services. The industry led Open Banking Working Group, which HM Treasury has set up, will publish a report by the end of the year with more detail on the design of the open API standard and how it can be implemented.