Senior Trading Policy Associate

Requirements of the role

About the FCA

The FCA regulates the conduct of 45,000 firms in the UK to ensure our financial markets are honest, fair and competitive. Follow this link to find out more About the FCA.

The Market Intervention – Trading Venues department is at the heart of the FCA strategy to seek to ensure that UK market infrastructures are resilient, transparent and operate in a fair and orderly way. The department sits in the Infrastructure & Exchanges directorate. It is responsible, among other things, for supervising trading venues and for developing the policy that applies to them and to the investment firms dealing on those venues or OTC. We develop smart and early policy interventions to address emerging risks we see in the market and to influence global and UK policy.

The Trading Policy team is responsible for shaping and implementing the policy for trading venues – such as investment exchanges – and for firms dealing in wholesale markets like broker-dealers, proprietary trading firms and commodity derivatives trading firms. We cover a broad range of issues such as the organisational and transparency requirements of trading venues, algorithmic and high frequency trading, commodity derivatives and market data.

We do this in a number of ways:

• Driving the development of domestic rules and international standards for trading venues and trading firms
• Working with HM Treasury and the Bank of England on the broader UK policy on market infrastructures
• Providing ongoing policy support to FCA teams supervising trading venues and trading firms
• Identifying and mitigating future areas of risk in the trading and conduct landscape

We place a high priority on open and collaborative working, both with our internal stakeholders (International, Legal, Secondary Markets Oversight, Competition) and externally with other markets authorities such as HM Treasury, the Bank of England and IOSCO.

What will you be doing?
The team is responsible for delivering the Wholesale Markets Review (WMR), the review of UK wholesale financial markets we have been conducting with the Treasury. The WMR has a broad scope. It includes transparency in equity, bonds and derivatives markets, market data and data consolidation and commodity derivatives. You will:

• Horizon scan the relevant markets to identify issues and risks to our objectives. This includes extracting, analysing and interpreting quantitative information to support policy development (advanced Excel knowledge such as pivot tables and lookups and/or ability to extract data from databases using SQL).
• Develop policy reforms end to end including by drafting consultation documents and public statements
• Work with internal and external stakeholders, especially our newly formed secondary markets advisory committee to help support and deliver our policy reforms
• Provide policy advice, also in the form of policy papers and briefs, to internal stakeholders

The specific responsibilities of the post will depend on the skills and experience of the successful candidate. However, they are likely to include policy on algo and quantitative trading, transparency and market data and commodity derivatives.

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