Responding to today's announcement from the Bank of England, Ruth Doubleday, Head of Prudential Regulation at the BSA said:

"The BSA welcomes the clarity in today’s announcement from the Bank of England on the timelines for Basel 3.1 and Small Domestic Deposit-Takers (SDDT). Aligning the two regimes gives firms the certainty they need to plan, subject to sight of the final SDDT rules in Q4 this year. The BSA and its members stand ready to support the PRA in delivering the changes. Building societies are not permitted to undertake trading activities and are therefore not impacted by the one year delay to the market risk changes.

"We also welcome the emphasis on supporting the UK mortgage market and growth more generally, and the recognition that more needs to be done to support mid-tier firms that are too large to be SDDT but too small and simple to be systemic. We look forward to the discussion paper to help mid-sized banks and building societies to grow through changes to the IRB requirements for residential mortgages.  This is particularly relevant to government’s agenda to support mutuals and the mortgage market.

"For MREL, today’s announcements on the threshold increases are a step in the right direction. However, it doesn’t solve the problem of the interactions between leverage ratio and MREL when applied to low-risk building societies. It’s also disappointing to see no change to the indicative thresholds for transactional accounts (40,000-80,000) which mean some SDDT firms could be captured inappropriately."

Ends

Contact: pressoffice@bsa.org.uk 

Notes to Editors:

The Building Societies Association (BSA) represents all 42 UK building societies, including both mutual-owned banks, as well as 7 of the largest credit unions. Building societies have total assets of almost £525 billion and together with their subsidiaries, hold residential mortgages of over £395 billion, 24% of the total outstanding in the UK. They also hold £399 billion of retail deposits, accounting for 19% of all such deposits in the UK. Building societies account for 40% of all cash ISA balances. 

The Bank of England's announcement can be viewed here