ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCYAND MEASURING OUR SUCCESS


Of course, we are not starting from scratch and there has been much to build on from the move to internal ‘twin peaks’ within the FSA.


Recognising that an organisation’s culture has to be set at the top, we have further strengthened our recruitment of senior staff to ensure that we have the right leaders on board. We will continue to rigorously test their technical ability, but also now whether they possess the characteristics and behaviour we are looking for.


We want all our staff to display the desired behaviour and will support them to achieve this. Effective internal and external communication will play its part by reinforcing how our behaviour can lead and has led to good external outcomes. This will help us be clear about what type of people we want, which in turn will help focus our recruitment and target the right people for the right roles. As part of this, we expect to shift the balance towards recruiting more experienced people.


The FCA must attract and retain the right calibre of people if it is to deliver its objectives.


The FCA must attract and retain the right calibre of people if it is to deliver its objectives. We face many challenges; for example, a significant number of people are leaving the FSA after being here four to five years, as we are often seen as an industry training ground. We are working on how to attract and keep the best staff as part of a wide-ranging review of the current policies, processes and activities related to our people and our culture. This includes a fresh look at how we recruit and measure our staff performance, as well as the training and development support we offer. These are complex problems for any organisation, which take time to work through, and we aim to establish clarity and get some key matters underway during the first 18 months of the FCA’s life.


One of the sources of good people who understand firms and how they work is of course the industry itself. In the first half of 2012/13 the FSA recruited more than 100 staff from the financial services industry. The FCA will also want to seek people from other industries and from diverse backgrounds, who can apply relevant experience and display the behaviour we are looking for.


Once we have recruited the right people, we need to retain them, and one of the ways of doing this is by providing the right training. This has already begun; for example, our supervisors now have specific modules on oversight of products and understanding consumer behaviour as part of their induction and will have others, such as business model analysis, added in the new year. We will continue the FSA’s approach to supervisor induction, which is both training and assessment. Everyone is tested and must be deemed competent, otherwise they are not retained.


For potential new entrants and the talented individuals that we already have, we will need to provide more career progression opportunities. This could mean establishing proportionately more senior positions and responsibilities. We are also improving our performance management methods to ensure that the best people progress and are properly recognised.


Measuring success


Regulatory success is hard to judge, especially to those who may only see the things that go wrong, and not the daily interactions between regulator and firms. Essentially, success is often judged by what a regulator prevents from happening, or worsening, while failure is seen as what is missed or dealt with slowly or ineffectively. To help us further improve the ways we measure our performance we have looked at what similar organisations do.

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