But what is also speeding up is financial sector actors’ judgement of strategic opportunities in their environment and their moves to take advantage of them. New and cheaper technology, as well as deregulation, has greatly helped this. Business models get adopted and discarded more quickly.
This will test regulators and supervisors, for whom the challenge will be to create rules of the game that are robust to fad, fashions and arbitrage. There are several consequences of the characteristics I have mentioned and to which will I return. However, one, consolidation, has itself become a characteristic of the present environment.