Standard Chartered's Bill Winters criticizes UK’s regulatory chokehold on banks

Bill Winters, chief executive of Standard Chartered, said this week that banks have been left behind by private credit firms, and the gap won’t be closing anytime soon.

He made the comments during a Bloomberg Television interview aired on Tuesday, marking his tenth year leading the London-based lender. “That’s just the reality,” Bill said. “I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon. The result of which is banks are disadvantaged lenders.”

According to Bloomberg, he blamed higher capital requirements that were enforced after the 2008 financial meltdown for tilting the field in favor of private credit.

Bill explained that while traditional banks stepped back from riskier lending, private credit firms stepped in fast. The total size of that industry has now ballooned to $1.7 trillion, and firms like Apollo Global Management are convinced this is just the beginning.

He didn’t attack the post-crisis Basel reforms directly but pointed fingers at UK regulators, especially the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), for making it worse. “We’ve got really huge numbers of individuals in the UK — the PRA and FCA — who are focusing on our business,” he said. “One, they’re too intrusive, it’s too costly. Two, I don’t think you actually get a good return on that.”

Bill criticizes UK’s regulatory chokehold on banks

Bill, who used to work at JPMorgan Chase, said the current regulatory culture has left bank executives relying too heavily on what their supervisors approve. “If our supervisors don’t stop us, we assume it must be OK,” he said. “Of course, we don’t make that consciously, but deep down, I think there’s a risk we get there.”

That mindset, Bill warned, is dangerous and can lead to poor decisions, especially when pressure from regulators blocks innovation and slows reaction time.

He also weighed in on the growing complaints from other major banks like HSBC and Lloyds. They’ve been speaking out against the UK ring-fencing rules, which require banks to separate consumer banking from riskier investment activity. 

Bill helped design those rules years ago, but now he thinks they need to be updated. “There is a debate now about whether the ring-fenced entity should be allowed to be bigger or to take more deposits before you have to ring-fence,” he said. “I think those kinds of refinements make perfect sense.”

While Bill was tackling the challenges that banks face in the regulated world, his company has been strongly advocating for crypto, and Bitcoin the most. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of crypto research at Standard Chartered, said his original Bitcoin forecast was too conservative.

In an email to clients sent in May, Geoffrey admitted, “I apologise that my USD120k Q2 target may be too low.” He originally made the call in April, predicting that Bitcoin would hit $120,000 in the second quarter of 2025, driven by whale accumulation and investors moving money away from US assets.

Geoffrey expects Bitcoin to keep rising through the summer, with a year-end target of $200,000. “We expect these supportive factors to push BTC to a new all-time high of around USD 120,000 in Q2,” he said. “We see gains continuing through the summer, taking BTC-USD towards our year-end forecast of 200,000.

“The dominant story for Bitcoin has changed again,” Geoffrey wrote. “It was a correlation to risk assets… It then became a way to position for strategic asset reallocation out of US assets.” And now? “It is now all about flows. And flows are coming in many forms.”

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