Skip to main content

Financial regulation and how business schools are rebalancing learning to help create a safer financial future

Professor John Board, Dean of Henley Business School and Director of the ICMA Centre, was recently interviewed by the Financial Times on the subject of financial regulation and what business schools can do to help create a safer financial industry.

John discussed with Emma Boyde, Business Education Reporter at the FT, that regulation and an increase in prosecutions has helped make the financial industry a little safer and had a salutary effect on the behaviour of finance professionals. He indicated that mistakes have been caused by bad practice and the introduction of new products without fully understanding them, and that while increased technical regulation has its place, regulation of behaviour is essential.

When asked about what business schools could do to make the financial world a safer place, Professor Board commented:

“A lot of business schools are re-thinking their positions on the balance between technical details of financial products and more traditional leadership, strategy and ethical behaviours which business schools would’ve been teaching 20 or 30 years ago.”

He said that Henley Business School is “being very clear about the balance between personal development and personal behaviour and the way businesses should be run, the way strategy has to be embedded deeply in a firm…it’s got to be clear, it’s got to be consistent and it’s got to be forced through to every part of the firm.”

To view the full interview with Professor John Board on the Financial Times’ website, click here.

Published 6 January 2014

You might also like

Growing green bonds could help the environment

28 November 2019
Whilst climate change is seen as one of the main sources of risk for global economies and societies, green bonds represent one instrument to finance the move towards a lower-carbon economy.
Business News

Wellington College students try their hands as traders for a day

23 November 2015
Year 12 students from Wellington College in Crowthorne visited the ICMA Centre on Wednesday to take part in a stock market competition, in which pupils were pitted against each other in a simulation of a trading floor.

Peer to Peer (P2P) Lending – ‘Bank on Dave’ and many others

4 March 2013
If you live in the UK, you may have seen the Channel 4 television programme on 28th February this year (2013) entitled ‘Bank on Dave’. Burnley Savings and Loans to give it its other name, is a company (not a bank) which offers 5% ‘deposit’ rates to lenders and offers loans to those who cannot obtain funding from the high street banks. So how does Dave do this when the high street banks offer no interest at all or perhaps only ½ or 1%? In fact ‘Dave’ is one of a new breed of ‘brokers’ who simply introduce lenders and borrowers to each other. The key difference from banks is that banks have a balance sheet with a depositor contract on one side and a separate contract with its borrowers on the other whereas a peer to peer company has no such contracts and indeed is not even involved at all in borrowing or lending! This is because in P2P, lending contracts are directly between borrower and lenders and the P2P company does not take ‘deposits’ on to its own balance sheet or keep the loans its customers make on its balance sheet.