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The Financial Services Industry : Corporate Structure, Legislation And Regulation

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The financial services industry will be described by four different markets: banking, securities, insurance and pension. The discussion will cover matters linked to topics such as corporate structure, legislation and regulation, hot topics in UK financial markets and impacts from other industries. .

1. Banking (Corporate structure)
There are 5 main independent British retail banks: HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS), Barclays and Standard Chartered. In the 2008 financial crisis, the UK government announced a bank rescue package which includes purchases of a combination of ordinary shares and preference shares from certain banks through the Bank Recapitalisation Fund. However, this fund was rejected by HSBC, Standard Chartered and Barclays. RBS raised £20 billion from the fund and the government purchased £5 billion preference shares and £15 billion ordinary shares from RBS. HBOS and Lloyds TSB together raised £17 billion, and government purchased £8.5 billion preference shares and £8.5 billion ordinary shares.

With the recovery of the economics, UK government start selling shares of RBS and Lloyds TSB to reduce the state-owned portion in the bank shares. In August 2015, government sold £2.1bn of shares in RBS at a loss, as reported by BBC .

2. Securities (Impacts from other industries):
The securities sector is composed of stock brokers, fund managers, collective funds, private equity and etc. One of the current matters in UK is the

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