Feedback on Ring-Fencing
The ACT’s Treasurers Forum comprises a group of members working in corporate treasury and excludes those in advisory firms, technology vendors and banks. The Policy & Technical team use the group to help inform them on specific issues.
This survey had a very low response rate – only 10% of the group replied. If you can let the team know how we can improve response rates in future we would be very grateful.
If you are not a member and would like to participate in our short surveys, please drop a note to technical@treasurers.org
In response to a request from the FCA, the last survey looked at experiences from our members of ring fencing.
This note provides a summary of our findings.
The questions we asked and the survey results
- How much work did ring-fencing create for you?
None
|
A little
|
A lot
|
25%
|
63%
|
13%
|
- How has ring-fencing made the dealings with your bank?
More complex
|
Less complex
|
None
|
75%
|
|
25%
|
- Has ring-fencing been successful from a corporate perspective?
- Do you think ring-fencing has been positive for the financial stability of the UK?
Unsure
|
Yes
|
No
|
13%
|
25%
|
63%
|
- Do you think ring-fencing has been positive for supporting the growth of financial services in the UK?
Responses
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- It was a headache for family offices and their banks. The thing about family offices is that there is generally a mix of entities: large companies; small companies; individuals; partnerships etc., but as a customer you want clear relationship management, a single electronic banking platform etc. That does not sit well with ring-fencing. At one stage we had a four-month delay opening a bank account for a new entity as the bank couldn't work out where in its organisation the account should sit. On the other hand, other enterprises sailed through with no issues.
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-
- The fact that UK clearing banks all took different approaches to assessing whether you were to be serviced by the ring-fenced bank or not was irritating. The companies I have worked at were either considered mid-size or large so treated differently, perhaps this wasn’t a problem for the very large corporates. Then the banks took the approach to change the bank and sort code for the large corporates so that consumers did not need to change. Any change to sort code had a knock on effect on treasury management systems and processes; change of SSIs notification to counterparties/clients/suppliers, changes to system standing data and processes such as payments, bank statement imports and reconciliation.
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- I’m not a fan of bank ringfencing. We’ve had issues where acquisitions have banked with the same bank as us, but we’ve been either side of the fence for ring-fencing so we’ve had to shut accounts and open new ones etc to get cash pooling.
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- Q4 – No - concentrates particular assets into one entity without benefit of diversification
|
-
- We had to change some sort codes for key bank accounts which created config work and ongoing work on client settlement disruption, we also had to look at where client money was held.
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- It is problematic when we do M&A and the M&A is in small bank and we are in large bank and it is all the same bank! And increased level of Admin.
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Naresh Aggarwal
9 October 2025