The head of new City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority has vowed to take a more proactive approach than his predecessors, monitoring social media sites like Twitter to sniff out illegal behaviour.
As he prepares to take up his role as chief executive of the FCA next week, Martin Wheatley told This is Money that new information gathering methods will be introduced to help identify things such as the PPI miss-selling scandal.
"What's new is that we won't just be relying on regulatory reports back from firms, but on reports from consumer bodies, internet monitoring, the media and even on Twitter," says Wheatley.
Magnus Almqvist, senior product specialist, capital markets business, SunGard, says: "This highlights that there's growing demand in financial services to introduce efficient and scalable automated solutions that monitor both sales activity and communication via corporate web pages and social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook."