Howard Davies

Why organisations work with Sir Howard Davies

• He is the only person to have both designed the UK’s single financial regulatory architecture – merging nine agencies into the FSA between 1997 and 2003 – and then governed a major commercial bank as its chair. That double vantage point is not replicable by any other speaker in this space.
• His 2022 book The Chancellors (Polity Press), based on direct interviews with UK Chancellors of the Exchequer, provides boards with a forensic account of how fiscal and monetary policy decisions are actually made under political constraint – directly relevant to any organisation calibrating its exposure to policy risk.
• He maintains current, published views on global regulatory fragmentation, ESG retreat in financial services, and the direction of financial supervision through his Project Syndicate column and Financial Times contributions – his perspective is live, not retrospective.
• His tenure as Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry gives him a period in his career where he represented the commercial case in dialogue with regulators and government – meaning he understands regulatory negotiation from the business side as well as the supervisory side.
• As Chair of Inigo Limited at Lloyd’s of London and a member of a Chinese securities regulatory advisory council, he brings active, multi-jurisdictional board-level experience to questions about how regulatory divergence is reshaping global financial markets.

Biography highlights

• Founding Chairman, UK Financial Services Authority (1997-2003) – created the UK’s single financial regulator by merging nine separate agencies
• Deputy Governor, Bank of England (1995-1997)
• Chair, NatWest Group (2015-2024)
• Director, London School of Economics and Political Science (2003-2011)
• Professor of Practice, Sciences Po, Paris – teaches financial regulation and central banking at master’s level
• Six published books on finance and economic policy, including Banking on the Future (Princeton University Press, 2010) and The Chancellors (Polity Press, 2022)
• Regular contributor to Project Syndicate and the Financial Times
• Director-General, Confederation of British Industry (1992-1995)
• Chair, UK Airports Commission (2012-2015)
• Knight Bachelor (2000)

Biography

Financial regulation is not a technical discipline that sits at the edge of the boardroom. It is a political process that reshapes the commercial options available to every regulated institution – and boards that treat it as a compliance matter, rather than a strategic one, tend to be late to the table when the framework shifts.

Sir Howard Davies has operated at the centre of that process for three decades. As founding Chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority, he created the country’s single financial regulator from scratch between 1997 and 2003, merging nine separate agencies into one body. That work – designing supervisory architecture under political instruction, negotiating between commercial interests and public mandates – gives him a form of institutional authority that no amount of academic or advisory work can replicate. His earlier role as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and his preceding three years as Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, adds the monetary policy and business lobby dimensions to a perspective that is genuinely triangulated across the full regulatory relationship.

From 2015 to 2024 he served as Chair of NatWest Group, guiding the bank through a nine-year transformation from a state-aided institution to a commercially independent one. Governance under political scrutiny, board accountability in a regulated environment, and reputational risk in real time are not abstractions in his work – they are operational experience. His six published books, among them The Chancellors (Polity Press, 2022), based on direct interviews with UK Chancellors of the Exchequer, bring the same analytical rigour to economic policymaking that his regulatory career brought to financial supervision.

He is currently Chair of Inigo Limited at Lloyd’s of London, a member of the International Advisory Council of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and Professor of Practice at Sciences Po in Paris, where he teaches financial regulation and central banking. For boards in regulated sectors trying to read the direction of travel in financial supervision – across jurisdictions, not just domestically – his vantage point is without direct equivalent.

Key speaking topics

• Financial regulation and regulatory reform
• Banking governance and board oversight
• Central banking and monetary policy
• Economic policy and the role of the Treasury
• Regulatory risk and political risk in financial services
• Global financial markets and cross-border regulatory divergence
• ESG strategy in financial services

Ideal for

• Boards and audit/risk committees in banks, insurers, and asset managers
• Financial regulators, policymakers, and supervisory bodies
• CHROs and general counsel in highly regulated sectors navigating governance reform
• Senior leaders in institutional investment and sovereign wealth management

Audience outcomes

• A clearer understanding of how financial regulatory frameworks are made and how they change under political pressure – not just what the current rules are
• Practical framing of the governance responsibilities that sit above compliance, drawn from direct board experience at a major UK bank
• Perspective on the direction of global regulatory divergence, including between US, EU, and UK supervisory approaches
• A more calibrated view of how monetary policy decisions interact with fiscal policy, and what that means for strategic planning in financial institutions
• Insight into how the regulator-board relationship works in practice – and where it typically breaks down