Be kind to your compliance having a hard time of it. He is the fellow that banks have been hiring to make sure that their new activities - market-making and broking in gilts and equities, added as part of Big Bang. comply with the regulatory framework being put in place under the Financial Services Bill (FSB).
The Big Bang on October 27 was the culmination of reforms introduced by the London Stock Exchange. These included allowing non-members - mainly banks to buy its member jobbers (market makers) and brokers (agents who deal with the jobbers on the investors' behalf). What happened last month was the abolition of single capacity - the division between jobber and broker - and of the fixed commissions the brokers charge. All of this was part of the 1983 deal between the stock exchange and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in return for exempting the stock exchange from the ambit of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act. Under that Act, the stock exchange risked investigation of its allegedly restrictive and anti-competitive rules on membership and commission..
Lifting those rules has allowed such banks as Barclays, Kleinwort Benson, NatWest, Warburg, Schroder, Hill Samuel, Samuel Montagu and Morgan Grenfell to buy jobbers, brokers, or, in many cases, both.