CITY AM: FCA boss pledges to review listing rules to avoid another Arm snub

30 March 2023

Nikhil Rathi, the head of the FCA, said the City watchdog would consult on replacing the current standard and premium listing segments for shares in commercial companies with a single listing category with one set of requirements.

The chief of the Financial Conduct Authority has pledged to review the UK’s listing rules after several British firms ditched the City and opted for New York listings.

“This change, coupled with a focus on transparency, would lead to a significant reform of the FCA’s listing rule book,” the regulator said in a statement today.

The pledge came on top of calls for new policies to encourage British firms to list in London and not take flight to New York.
Rathi said that while failure to win the listing of Cambridge chipmaker Arm had “focused minds”, improving the appeal of London had not been a “priority area for public policy for decades”. 

Many have blamed the FCA for firms’ decisions to snub London, but Rathi said it was time for a fundamental policy rethink on developing and protecting the UK’s capital markets.

“Rather than simply lamenting these decisions or insisting that a few regulatory levers would change the outcomes, it is important to recognise that [there] has not until now been a fundamental discussion about the entire ecosystem,” he told attendees at the Global Investment Management Summit in London earlier today.

“That lack of system-wide focus has come at a time, when the shape of the global economy – and our share of it – has also changed dramatically,” he added...

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