City of London supports the new reforms.

City of London heads has backed the government's financial services reforms as necessary to keep London competitive outside the EU, even if the unwinding of safeguards from the last financial crisis increases risk. However, many of the FT's City Network, a group of 50 senior executives, believed that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt's Edinburgh reforms needed to be more significant to yield a second Big Bang for the City. On December 8, Hunt unveiled in the Scottish capital the most extensive set of City reforms for decades, including post-2008 rules on bank ringfencing, where lenders separate retail activities from their riskier investment banking arms. Other areas targeted for reform include the senior managers' regime, which puts personal responsibility for corporate problems on the heads, and aspects of EU regulations such as Mifid II, which governs financial markets, and Solvency II rules for insurers.

The document contained more than 30 proposals focused on repealing retained EU law in financial services and replacing it with a new framework tailored to the UK. He pointed to the balance needed between risk and reward but said that it was time to move on while remembering the lessons of the last financial crisis. "Some of the regulations we put in place were making us less competitive. "Other City leaders said that risk would inevitably increase with changes to rules that tightly bound how the City operated. "

Sir Win Bischoff, chair of JPMorgan Securities, said the first Big Bang in the 1980s, which refers to the deregulation of financial markets under Margaret Thatcher, was of a different order of magnitude. Several in the City Network welcomed the consultation into relaxing the strict rules associated with the senior managers' regime. Ann Cairns, a vice-chair at Mastercard, said the government was keen to show some benefits from Brexit but warned that the impact could be lessened if consultations dragged on and ended up diluting significant changes. While people can disagree about the speed of Britain's likely financial and social decline, the vote in 2016 set Britain off in a direction that will be very difficult to reverse.

"Former BT and KPMG chair Sir Mike Rake agreed with Hands and pointed out that many of the reforms were portrayed as "Brexit freedoms" that could have been done within the EU.".

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