In a report produced by Z/Yen Group, a think tank that specialises in the study of the competitiveness of financial centres around the world, the EU was ranked bottom when considering the quality of different aspects of regulation.
These factors included “ease of doing business; regulatory environment; operational risk; economic freedom; institutional effectiveness; regulatory enforcement; and business environment”.
The research showed that Canada and Singapore were the two jurisdictions with the best-rated regulatory environments for financial services. These were followed by the tier 2 jurisdictions of Hong Kong, Switzerland, the UK and the US.
Tier 3 included the EU and Dubai, which most respondents believed did not have as strong a regulatory environment as the leading centres.
Overall, nearly 90% of respondents agreed that regulations will become more onerous and a similar percentage agreed that regulations would become more costly. But just 17% of respondents agreed that regulations would become more effective, however.
Entitled Comparative Regulatory Environments: A Comparison of Financial Services Regulation in Eight Jurisdictions, and featuring the jurisdictions of Canada, Dubai, the EU, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK and the US, the report was based on responses to a questionnaire from more than 200 financial services professionals between October and December 2014.
“As repeated failures show, nobody is any safer, and as this report shows, nobody feels any safer either. More regulation is just adding simultaneously to complexity and fragility,” said Professor Michael Mainelli, executive chairman of Z/Yen.