In 2012 I kept hearing sighs of relief about the implementation of one or another regulatory or business imperative being put off until some future date.  Things that had been seen as a “priority” and having “major impact” for the financial sector gradually became seen as things that were over the hill and far away.

As my university professor told us at the end of our first Economics 101 lecture on perfect monopoly, “But of course, this doesn’t happen in real life”.  So, now that the holiday season is over and the story of Peter Pan and Neverland is not part of our daily viewing, we need to consider what will happen in real life.

When I was a boy and my father dragged me into the garden to help him for the first time, he showed me that when you’re digging it’s useful to remember not to put the earth that you dig up in the next place that you will have to put your spade, as otherwise you yourself cause every next spade-full to be twice as heavy.  And I was going to be the one that had to lift that next spade-full.

In 2012 the industry managed to get a lot of regulatory implementation workload shovelled forward in the calendar.  Whether that’s related to MiFID II or Dodd-Frank or T2S or some other regulation doesn’t really matter, as new regulations cover all aspects of the financial sector.  Much of what got moved was shovelled into 2014, though some lumps fell into 2013 on the way past.

We do have to recognise that those regulations have not gone away.  2013 is the year for getting ready to deal properly with that double spade-full of regulatory implementation work that the industry has put off until 2014.