Daily briefing: Friday - Vipond heads to the FSA

Peter Vipond wasn’t expected to stay out of the game for long. When it emerged during the summer that the ABI’s financial regulation director was leaving the organisation, the verdict from industry observers was that he would not be short of job offers.

Yesterday, the FSA announced that he will be joining the regulator at the beginning of next year in a newly created role. Reporting to insurance director Julian Adams, the insurance sector and prudential support department that he will head up is freshly minted too. Vipond’s main responsibility will be co-ordinating the work of the City watchdog’s specialist supervisors whose work has a bearing on the industry.

Vipond has rock-solid credentials for his new job at the FSA, having overseen regulation at the ABI for the last nine years and, before that, working for the British Bankers’ Association on Basel II – that sector’s equivalent to Solvency II .

The industry will no doubt be pleased that Vipond is inside the prudential regulation wing of the FSA. He is a well-respected character who has fought the industry’s corner both in the UK and at an international level for many years. As insurance regulation becomes increasingly globalised, the need to represent the industry abroad as well as at home will become more pressing.

Transparency at the expense of clarity

Transparency is ‘de rigeur’ in Whitehall at the moment, with the government publishing reams of information. From neighbourhood crime stats to public servants’ pay, the aim is to empower ordinary people by better informing them about the organisations that their taxes support.

The Financial Ombudsman Service has reacted to the zeitgeist with plans, enthusiastically pushed by its chief executive Natalie Ceeney, to publish all of its decisions. But in the vast majority of such cases, who is interested, except for the interested parties?

The ABI is unhappy about the plans, arguing against publishing every single one of the FOS’s decisions.

Instead, the association has argued that just those decisions with a wider bearing on the industry should be published, effectively an edited version. Transparency is a laudable objective, but the danger is that it risks creating an information overload.

● This is our final Daily Briefing of 2011, but we’ll be back with our daily dose of industry insight on Tuesday 3 January 2012. In the meantime, we’ll still be bringing you the latest news and developments online throughout the festive period.