LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s markets regulator will publish an update in autumn into how companies are detecting and dealing with sexual harassment, bullying and other non-financial misconduct, a senior official said on Wednesday.
Steve Smart, the joint head of enforcement at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), told a London conference that the regulator had received responses from around 1,000 firms during a cross-industry survey.
“This is the first time we have received such comprehensive data on the subject,” he told the City & Financial’s Financial Services Investigations and Enforcement Summit.
“We will publish an update from this work in the autumn and look forward to working with industry to interpret and draw lessons from them.”
The FCA has ordered banks, insurers and brokerages to report how many non-financial misconduct cases they have recorded since 2021 and how they have dealt with them – splitting out incidents attributed to senior managers and to lower-ranked staff.
Lawyers have said the survey amounts to 23 pages of comprehensive questions about incidents that range from whistleblowing and grievances to violence, intimidation or the possession or use of illegal drugs.
The FCA, which has said non-financial misconduct is relevant when considering whether people are “fit and proper” to work in finance, has said it might publish some aggregated data but will ensure that individual firms cannot be identified.
Smart also said he often spoke to his new counterpart at the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Nick Ephgrave, and was “pushing the idea” of more joint operations.
(Reporting by Kirstin Ridley; editing by Mark Heinrich)
