1 March 2012
The Financial Services Consumer Panel has today announced the appointment of three new members.
Fiona Fry, Jonathan May1 and Niamh Moloney will join the Panel with effect from 1st March 2012.
Adam Phillips, Chair of the Consumer Panel, commented:
"We are delighted to announce the appointment of three new members, who bring a wealth of experience to increase the Panel's expertise.
With financial services high on the media's agenda and with major legislation making its way through both the European and UK Parliaments it is an exciting time to be on the Panel. The new members will complement the current Panel membership, to ensure that we are better equipped to deal with issues such as consumer protection at EU level, competition and firms' systems and controls issues."
Notes to editors
- This appointment is subject to approval by the Prime Minister, under the Business Appointment Rules for Civil Servants and following advice from the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments.
- Biography of Fiona Fry
Fiona Fry is a senior Partner in KPMG's Financial Services practice and a member of KPMG's UK Board. She originally trained as a chartered accountant with Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co, then worked in insolvency at Arthur, Young, McLelland Moores & Co and Corporate Finance at Ernst & Young. She has also worked at the London Stock Exchange.
Fiona has been involved in consumer related regulation for over 20 years, including a role as Head of Investigations at IMRO and then the FSA, before joining KPMG in 1999. During her time as a regulator, Fiona led many reviews and investigations of misselling and other customer related matters, such as client money and assets. She led IMRO's work on the pensions transfer issue and the investigation into the Morgan Grenfell/Peter Young issue.
Fiona leads KPMG's Financial Sector Regulatory Risk Consulting practice and, since taking up Partnership at KPMG, she has played an integral part in KPMG's Retail Financial Services work. She headed up KPMG's approach to Treating Customers Fairly (TCF), leading two of the biggest TCF transformations in the insurance sector. She also led KPMG's Retail Distribution Review work until the end of 2010. Over her time at KPMG, Fiona has led numerous reviews of misselling and related controls issues in banks, insurers and fund managers, including many section 166 reports. Fiona speaks regularly on such matters, including for the BBA and ABI.
- Biography of Jonathan May
Jonathan has had a wide-ranging career in the civil service and is currently working in the competition field. Since leaving the Office of Fair Trading in 2010, Jonathan has become a Member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal and a Special Advisor on consumer, competition and regulatory issues for Finsbury International Policy and Regulatory Advisors.
Jonathan was closely involved in the development of competition and regulatory policy, first at the Treasury then the Department of Trade and Industry and, since 2001, the Office of Fair Trading. At the OFT he was responsible for market studies, looking at competition and consumer issues together, and for references to the Competition Commission and, from 2006 as Executive Director and member of the Board, for policy and delivery across most of OFT's consumer and competition interests. At the Treasury, his interests included public spending, privatisation, energy, utilities and competition and he led on the windfall tax on privatised utilities and the energy and utility reviews of the late 1990s. At the DTI he brought the Competition Act into effect and led on the Competition White Paper and regulatory issues.
- Biography of Niamh Moloney
Niamh Moloney is Professor of Financial Markets Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She holds law degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Harvard Law School.
She specialises in EU financial market regulation and in particular in EU investor and consumer protection law. Niamh has published widely in this field in leading international journals and is a board member of a number of leading journals and a co-editor of a major Cambridge University Press monograph series on international corporate law and financial regulation. She has also published a number of books, including the first book on EU financial market regulation (EC Securities Regulation, 2 ed, Oxford University Press, 2008) and a recent book on retail investor protection regulation (How to Protect Investors: Lessons from the EU and the UK, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Reflecting her interest in EU investor protection regulation, she is a Fellow (Household Finance) of the Centre for Financial Studies, Frankfurt.
In May 2011 Niamh was appointed by the Board of Supervisors of the new European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) to its advisory Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group.
- The Consumer Panel is a statutory body under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and was initially established by the Financial Services Authority in December 1998. The Panel advises the FSA on the interests and concerns of consumers and reports on the FSA's performance in meeting its objectives.
- The emphasis of the Panel's work is on activities that are regulated by the FSA, although it may also look at the impact on consumers of activities outside but related to the FSA's remit. More information about the Panel's work is available on our website.
- Panel members are appointed to serve a maximum of two terms of three years.