Local Lending Data For 10,000 Postcodes

The government have announced that the UK’s biggest lenders will reveal how much they lend at a local level across 10,000 postcodes.

The new data, published for the first time by the end of this year, will allow businesses and the public to see how the banking and building society sectors are serving the wider economy, and in what areas of the UK there less lending.

The data will be published by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) and the Council of Mortgage Lenders on a quarterly basis and show the outstanding stock of lending that has been committed to customers across three categories:

• loans and overdrafts to SMEs
• mortgages
• unsecured personal loans (excluding credit cards)

Each postcode will be broken down by category to show the exact lending being made to each.

All very well maybe, but why delay it until the end of the year?

Keydata and The FSA

The collapse of Keydata, the structured product provider, which went into administration when the FSA forced it to set aside £5M to cover the tax bill and the potential of legal action arising from products investing in life settlements raises some interesting questions wrt the role of the FSA.

Seemingly the FSA was investigating issues around Keydata's product selling for several months before it collapsed.

- What were the FSA looking for?

- Did the FSA find what they were looking for?

- Why did the investigation take so long?

- Was the investigation the cause of the collapse?

- If the FSA knew that there was a problem with a product, which may threaten the existence of the company, why did they allow the company to continue to trade that product and why did they allow the directors to continue to draw their salaries (salaries of Keydata's three directors increased eightfold in three years to just under £2 million in 2008)?

Is this another example of the FSA being asleep at the wheel?