Britain’s financial watchdogs yesterday unveiled rules to help whistleblowers in the banking and insurance sectors. They also made proposals to tighten up how banks and insurers obtain references on potential hires.

The British government unveiled plans yesterday to centralise financial regulation further at the Bank of England and reinforce its own powers to shield taxpayers from having to prop up failing lenders in future.

TSB’s takeover by Spanish bank Banco de Sabadell has been sealed after UK City regulators gave the £1.7bn deal the green light.

The Bank of England won’t include UK units of banks located outside the EU in its 2015 stress test and is unlikely to do so next year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

It will take another five years or more to make real inroads into the dominance of Britain’s five biggest banks, a senior Bank of England official said yesterday.

It has been decided that rules making senior bankers in Britain more accountable for their actions will not apply to non-executive directors who do not have specific duties such as scrutinising bonuses.

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Lloyds Banking Group Plc, Britain’s two publicly owned lenders, barely passed the Bank of England’s first stress test, while Co-Operative Bank Plc failed.

Royal Bank of Scotland vowed there would be no repeat of a system crash two years ago that left millions of customers unable to make or receive payments, after it was fined £56m(€70m) by British regulators yesterday.

Royal Bank of Scotland is to pay fines totalling £56m following an IT meltdown in 2012 which locked millions of customers out of their accounts.

Lloyds Banking Group has set aside an extra £900m (€1.1m) for mis-sold insurance.

Britain has given its banks three months to show how they plan to protect their retail customers from riskier parts of their operations.

The Bank of England has eased a curb on risky mortgages that are large relative to a borrower’s income, amid signs that Britain’s housing market has begun to cool.

London: Bank of England deputy governor Andrew Bailey said the increasingly large fines banks face for poor conduct threaten to undermine efforts to recapitalise the industry.

Britain’s regulators have given the green light to five new banks since easing rules a year ago for new entrants to challenge the handful of dominant lenders.

Confidence in the two new financial services regulators will be at risk unless more is done to attract and retain staff, the public spending watchdog has warned.

Ben Broadbent and Nemat Shafik will become deputy governors at the Bank of England as Mark Carney leads the biggest management shakeup since the institution gained independence in 1997.

The Bank of England is scrutinising allowances awarded to top staff by banks in an effort to establish whether they are a covert way of avoiding a new EU cap on bonuses, a senior official at Britain’s central bank said yesterday.

Royal Bank of Scotland is facing allegations of “unscrupulous” treatment of small businesses in a report claiming the lender drove firms to collapse to buy back their assets at rock-bottom prices.

Plans to boost credit to small businesses in the UK have been dealt a blow after a major lender delayed its launch into the sector until 2016.

Plans to make it easier for new banks to challenge the dominance of the current “big four” players were announced by policymakers in the UK today.

The man tasked with regulating the City of London in the run-up to the near-collapse of the British banking system has been knighted in the UK’s new year Honours.

BRITAIN’S banks are drawing up contingency plans in case there is a disorderly break-up of the eurozone or exit of some countries from the single currency as the sovereign debt crisis rages on, a top British regulator said yesterday.

Banking reforms need to move away from the “demonisation” of overpaid traders, the head of the UK's City regulator said.

INTERNATIONAL financial regulators are probing transactions at the Dublin subsidiary of an insurance company owned by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.