Around 4,000 financial services firms in the United Kingdom are at risk of bankruptcy due to the economic fallout of the pandemic, a survey by the official Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th January, 2021) Around 4,000 financial services firms in the United Kingdom are at risk of bankruptcy due to the economic fallout of the pandemic, a survey by the official Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
"A market downturn driven by the pandemic risks significant numbers of firms failing. At end of October we've identified there are 4,000 financial services firms with low financial resilience and at heightened risk of failure," Sheldon Mills, executive director of Consumers and Competition at the FCA, said in a report.
Mills went on to say that the firms are predominantly small- and medium-sized and that "approximately 30 percent have the potential to cause harm in failure."
The regulator conducted a survey of some 23,000 financial firms in two tranches last year and quantified the data in October.
The FCA found that during the first wave of the pandemic, an inflow of liquidity was observed in retail investments (8 percent), in retail lending (8 percent) in the financial market with the participation of institutional investors (83 percent). The outflow of liquidity was in the insurance market (30 percent), in the systems of electronic payments and transfers (11 percent), as well as in investment management (2 percent).
About 59 percent of surveyed financial companies believe that the coronavirus will have a negative impact on their business.
