On 15 October 2015, HM Treasury announced, in a policy paper on extending the senior managers and certification regime (SM&CR) to all financial services firms, that it was scrapping the controversial “presumption of responsibility”. This was the provision that, where there was a failing by a bank in an area for which a senior banker […]

In this report (originally published by PLC) Alison McHaffie (Partner, UK @ CMS) discusses the government’s decision to replace the controversial “presumption of responsibility” with a statutory “duty of responsibility” requiring senior managers to take reasonable steps to prevent regulatory breaches in their area of responsibility. The report also considers what this means in practice […]