Relleen's capital markets pitch: reform is done, risk-taking is the next test

Jon Relleen used the Reform of the UK Public and Private Capital Markets Summit on 5 October to draw a line under the FCA's multi-year wholesale reform programme and reframe the next phase around tokenisation, AI and private company share trading (FCA). The message to the room was that the regulator has done its structural work and now expects the market to use the headroom.

Key Executive Takeaways

• The FCA says it has completed the major phase of UK wholesale market reform and is shifting focus to tokenisation, AI and private share markets, meaning firms should expect rulemaking to move from plumbing to product.
• Firm trust in the FCA has risen sharply, with 79% highly satisfied with the relationship and a 27-point jump in understanding of the growth and competitiveness objective, giving executives a stronger basis to engage on commercial priorities.
• Board-level change at the FCA and the Bank of England's enforcement body signals a more experienced, markets-literate supervisory bench, raising the quality bar for firm engagement on contested cases and strategic reform.

A regulator asking to be judged on growth

Relleen framed the programme around "reforming from a position of strength" and "rebalancing risk", stressing that "trust, market integrity and high standards set the foundations for sustainable growth, and it is crucial that we also enable informed risk-taking" (FCA). That phrasing matters. The FCA is explicitly inviting issuers, intermediaries and investors to take more risk inside the new rulebook, and is signalling it will treat that as evidence the reforms are working.

The timing is deliberate. Three days earlier, the FCA and Practitioner Panel survey showed 76% of firms rating the regulator as highly effective, up from 69%, with a 27-percentage point increase in firms' understanding of the Secondary International Competitiveness and Growth Objective and a 25-point rise in confidence in its delivery (FCA). Matt Hammerstein, chair of the Practitioner Panel, pushed the FCA to be "clearer about the outcomes it expects its priorities to produce, and more vocal about the progress it is making" (FCA). Relleen's speech reads as a direct response: here is the scoreboard, now play.

The governance signal behind the policy signal

The institutional changes around this message are not incidental. The FCA has added Lea Paterson CBE and Matthew Tobin as non-executive directors, with deputy chief executive Sarah Pritchard joining the Board from 1 October (FCA). Tobin's background advising HM Treasury on the Asset Protection Scheme, Credit Guarantee Scheme and the nationalisation of Bradford & Bingley brings crisis-era financing experience into the boardroom at exactly the moment the FCA is reopening risk tolerance.

In parallel, the Bank of England has appointed Carlos Conceicao and Alexander Justham to its Enforcement Decision Making Committee, with Justham bringing former London Stock Exchange and UBS Wealth Management UK experience to contested prudential and FMI cases (Bank of England). The combined effect is a more commercially fluent set of decision-makers across both authorities. Firms arguing the toss on enforcement, or lobbying on tokenisation rules, will face people who know how the trades actually work.

The counterweight firms cannot ignore

The growth pitch sits alongside a sharpened risk warning. The FPC's September record noted that interconnected vulnerabilities are more likely to crystallise together, with sovereign yields in advanced economies at levels not seen since 2008 and AI-related debt issuance broadening capital market exposure (Bank of England). The permission to take informed risk is being issued into a market the Bank considers more fragile, not less.

For boards, the practical implication is to treat the FCA's reform completion as a prompt to revisit capital markets strategy, particularly around private markets, tokenised instruments and AI-linked financing, while stress-testing those positions against the FPC's view of the cycle. The regulator has moved. The question is whether firms will be seen to have moved with it, or waited to be told again.