Skip to main content

Financial regulation and how business schools are rebalancing learning to help create a safer financial future

Professor John Board, Dean of Henley Business School and Director of the ICMA Centre, was recently interviewed by the Financial Times on the subject of financial regulation and what business schools can do to help create a safer financial industry.

John discussed with Emma Boyde, Business Education Reporter at the FT, that regulation and an increase in prosecutions has helped make the financial industry a little safer and had a salutary effect on the behaviour of finance professionals. He indicated that mistakes have been caused by bad practice and the introduction of new products without fully understanding them, and that while increased technical regulation has its place, regulation of behaviour is essential.

When asked about what business schools could do to make the financial world a safer place, Professor Board commented:

“A lot of business schools are re-thinking their positions on the balance between technical details of financial products and more traditional leadership, strategy and ethical behaviours which business schools would’ve been teaching 20 or 30 years ago.”

He said that Henley Business School is “being very clear about the balance between personal development and personal behaviour and the way businesses should be run, the way strategy has to be embedded deeply in a firm…it’s got to be clear, it’s got to be consistent and it’s got to be forced through to every part of the firm.”

To view the full interview with Professor John Board on the Financial Times’ website, click here.

Published 6 January 2014

You might also like

The financial crisis - why students should still choose finance

12 February 2009
For those people considering going to university this year at MSc level, this financial crisis will be the first they have experienced. Yet financial crises happen every ten or twenty years. What is different this time is the severity of the crisis ? the likes of which no trader in the City has ever seen before. This article first outlines the causes of the crisis and then asks whether students should steer clear of finance, accounting and economics as subject disciplines and potential careers, until the crisis has receded? I argue that the clear answer is ?no".

A Free Lunch?

29 August 2018
Fidelity, the asset manager with $2.4 trillion assets under management, recently announced the launch of two index mutual funds with a 0% fee! This announcement is interesting for several reasons. First, the asset management industry has been involved in an intense price war and this new fee level of 0% represents a very tough benchmark for the competition to beat. Not surprisingly, the share price of rival asset managers fell by a few percentage points shortly after the announcement. Second, the new fee level is unusual as it indicates that, for the first time, investors could get exposure to both US and international equities without incurring any fee. This is a curious business decision. How will Fidelity manage to pay for all its expenses? Will this product be a loss-making venture? Is there more to it than meets the eyes?

Henley Public Lecture: Dr Andreas Hoepner discusses the myth of outperforming “sin firms”

2 March 2016
Professor of Finance at the ICMA Centre Dr Andreas Hoepner addressed an audience of Henley Business School students and external visitors at this year’s Henley Business School Public Lecture.