The Financial Sector Regulation Act of 2017 did not arrive as an isolated piece of legislation. It was the centrepiece of a deliberate reordering of how this country supervises its financial system — a recognition that prudential and conduct concerns required separate institutional homes, and that the post-crisis world demanded more than incremental reform.
Almost a decade on, the architecture has settled into a working state. The Prudential Authority and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority now occupy familiar positions in the regulatory landscape. Industry participants have adapted to dual supervision, and the courts have begun to develop a jurisprudence around the boundaries between the two authorities. To a participant who joined the sector in the past five years, the twin-peaks model may feel less like a design choice and more like a fact of nature.
That sense of inevitability is worth examining. The architecture was a choice — one made in the wake of a particular set of failures and informed by a particular reading of comparative experience. Its longevity does not prove its sufficiency, and the legal questions it now generates are precisely those that the original drafters acknowledged would emerge as practice matured.
This article revisits the original ambition of the FSR Act and considers three areas in which its architecture is being tested: the coordination of joint supervisory action, the handling of cross-cutting matters that engage both prudential and conduct dimensions, and the relationship between sector-specific legislation and the framework Act itself. The objective is not to argue for further reform, but to recover the conceptual coherence that the architecture was designed to deliver.