The Competition and Markets Authority, following its provisional decision of 18 July 2014, has launched a market investigation into the personal current account and SME retail banking sectors.
The investigation is aimed at finding out if low levels of customers shopping around and switching, limited transparency of the market, barriers to entry, stability of market shares of the 4 largest banks over time, are indicative of a restriction of competition in the relevant market.
To this end, the CMA has formed a Market Reference Group that will investigate in detail and decide what action, if any, may be needed to improve competition for the benefit of personal and small business customers.
Once formally appointed all the members, the group will publish a timetable for the various stages of the investigation and will set out the investigation’s proposed focus.
The official press release of the CMA is available here.
Source: CMA
Author: Claudio Lombardi
http://clombardi Claudio Lombardi is editor-in-chief of the Antitrust Observatory. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law and at the Europa-Kolleg Institute for European Integration, Hamburg. Claudio is also a visiting lecturer at the International University College of Turin (IUC). Before joining the Max-Planck, Claudio was a research fellow at the Higher School of Economics and Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development, Moscow, where he worked, with Prof. Ioannis Lianos (UCL), on a project on competition law and policy in the global food value chain, involving the cooperation of numerous national and international institutions. Prior to joining the Institute, he was a PhD student (competition law) and tutor (in private law) at the University of Trento and a Max-Planck Institute guest researcher (MPRIV – Hamburg). Claudio was also awarded a DAAD Grant of the Europa-Kolleg Institute of Hamburg in 2013 and an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship for doctoral researchers in 2012.
You can write him at clombardi27 at gmail.com