Standard Chartered CEO Slams UK’s ’Regulatory Chokehold’ on Banking Sector

Bill Winters doesn’t mince words—UK banks are gasping under red tape while fintechs and crypto firms bypass the old guard. Guess who’s winning?

Traditional finance’s regulatory straitjacket meets DeFi’s wild west. Place your bets.

Bill criticizes UK’s regulatory chokehold on banks

Bill, who used to work at JPMorgan Chase, said the current regulatory culture has left bank executives relying too heavily on what their supervisors approve. “If our supervisors don’t stop us, we assume it must be OK,” he said. “Of course, we don’t make that consciously, but DEEP down, I think there’s a risk we get there.”

That mindset, Bill warned, is dangerous and can lead to poor decisions, especially when pressure from regulators blocks innovation and slows reaction time.

He also weighed in on the growing complaints from other major banks like HSBC and Lloyds. They’ve been speaking out against the UK ring-fencing rules, which require banks to separate consumer banking from riskier investment activity. 

Bill helped design those rules years ago, but now he thinks they need to be updated. “There is a debate now about whether the ring-fenced entity should be allowed to be bigger or to take more deposits before you have to ring-fence,” he said. “I think those kinds of refinements make perfect sense.”

While Bill was tackling the challenges that banks face in the regulated world, his company has been strongly advocating for crypto, and Bitcoin the most. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of crypto research at Standard Chartered, said his original Bitcoin forecast was too conservative.

In an email to clients sent in May, Geoffrey admitted, “I apologise that my USD120k Q2 target may be too low.” He originally made the call in April, predicting that bitcoin would hit $120,000 in the second quarter of 2025, driven by whale accumulation and investors moving money away from US assets.

Geoffrey expects Bitcoin to keep rising through the summer, with a year-end target of $200,000. “We expect these supportive factors to push BTC to a new all-time high of around USD 120,000 in Q2,” he said. “We see gains continuing through the summer, taking BTC-USD towards our year-end forecast of 200,000.

“The dominant story for Bitcoin has changed again,” Geoffrey wrote. “It was a correlation to risk assets… It then became a way to position for strategic asset reallocation out of US assets.” And now? “It is now all about flows. And flows are coming in many forms.”

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