Any exposures to the rest of the group must be limited and on commercial terms. All large UK banking groups – defined as those with ‘core’ retail deposits greater than £ billion – are required to implement ring-fencing by 2019. Currently, seven banking groups cross this threshold. Between them, these groups have around £ trillion of assets, both in the UK and overseas. The ring-fencing regime is designed to be consistent with the other parts of the post-crisis regulatory framework. The most systemically-important ring-fenced banks will be held to higher capital requirements. The Systemic Risk Buffer will be applied to ring-fenced banks to ensure they are adequately capitalised and resilient to shocks. We expect ring-fenced banks to have, on average, around 1.5 percentage points more high-quality ‘Tier 1’ capital than non-systematically important banks.2 And a ring-fenced bank will not be able to be capitalised by debt raised externally by its group, which would give rise to so-called ‘double leverage’. Overall, the Bank estimates that ring-fenced banks’ total loss absorbency will be, on average, around 27% of their risk-weighted assets, higher than the 17% recommended by the ICB.3 Ring-fencing also helps improve the resolvability of the big UK banking groups. The resolution strategy for groups including ring-fenced banks will typically involve a bail-in at the level of the holding company. Bail-in would recapitalise the relevant entity by passing losses up to the holding company to be borne by shareholders and debt-holders. This should stabilise the group.
From Construction to Maintenance: Patrolling the ring-fence Speech given by James Proudman, Executive Director, UK Deposit Takers Supervision  Cass Business School, London 26 November 2018  I am grateful to Simon Debbage for preparing these remarks and to Michael Ainley, Sadia Arif, Charlotte Bull, David Eacott, Jeremy Leake, Duncan Mackinnon, Ben Martin, Alex Michie, Simon Morley, Rhys Phillips, Josh Sadler and Philip Sellar for their helpful contributions. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  Introduction It is a great pleasure to be here again at the Cass Business School, and I am very grateful to the Associate Dean for inviting me. In fact, Andrew and I have quite a lot in common. We share a birthday, for a start, and a home county (Hampshire). For a while, we also used to share an office, back in the far off days before the financial crisis, when – as young(ish) economists – we used to debate the relevance of the ‘corporate veil’ for determining macroeconomic outcomes. Nowadays, we don’t discuss the corporate veil so much as the banking ring-fence, and that is the focus of my speech tonight. A decade on from the financial crisis, one of the largest ever reforms to the structure of the UK banking industry is coming into force. By 1 January 2019, the largest UK banking groups must have implemented the ‘ring-fencing’ – or separation – of their UK retail business from their international and investment banking operations.