Thank you Bethany and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to this MCO webinar on the introduction to the extended senior managers and certification regime and the new conduct rules. Thank you for joining us today. There's quite a lot of ground to cover in a limited amount of time, so we will make no apologies for moving briskly. In terms of what we're going to cover today, we'll give you some brief background to the proposed new regime. Of course, this is a regime that's already been rolled out across the banking industry in the UK and PRA-regulated investment firms. We'll look at what this new regime is that's going to be extended now to the rest of the UK financial services industry, what it is, and what's going to change. We'll give you an overview of the new requirements and the core constituent elements of the regime, which breaks down [inaudible 00:04:59] between the regime for senior managers, a regime for certification staff, and some new conduct rules.

Then my colleague Simon Collins who leads our FS Regulatory Practice will talk you through issues around implementing the regime. We've worked with a number of banking clients over the last couple of years around implementation. There's lots of lessons learned and pitfalls and observations across some of the issues that can be accounted in practice, which we think could be helpful to share with you, at least at a high level today. Simon will walk you through all of that, as well as some practical advice around implementation and next steps. Moving on, I'll hand over to Simon now to talk to you about why we are where we currently are.

This webinar was co-hosted with Eversheds-Sutherland www.eversheds-sutherland.com