BSA 2012: Wheatley: Business will be more difficult under twin peaks

Speaking at the Building Societies’ Association annual conference, Wheatley said: “You have two regulators now and you have to realise that as the new reality. The first conflict, is that actually going to be more difficult? Well frankly yes.

“Two regulators means two regulators. It doesn’t mean we’ll somehow magically stitch the two together and it’ll seem as one single regulator. On that point, accept there are two sets of bodies with two sets of objectives working on different timetables.”

Wheatley added as an example that it would be quite possible that one regulator would visit a firm in the morning and another regulator could visit the same firm again in the afternoon.

He also said hat it would also be possible for the two regulators to reach judgements which conflict with each other. Wheatley said that in this scenario, conflicts will be settled through debate held by the Financial Policy Committee.