From City of London to Wellington: NZ's chief finance watchdog Samantha Barrass
Thursday, 17 February 2022
It was Samantha Barrass’ role in regulating New Zealand’s corporate climate change reporting that drew most comment from her fellow Brits as she prepared to depart the country of her birth.
Barrass was swapping the City of London for Wellington to become chief executive of the Financial Markets Authority Te Mana Tātai Hokohoko, New Zealand’s financial watchdog.
The FMA will soon regulate climate change reporting for roughly 200 large private companies and fund managers, including many KiwiSaver schemes, ensuring none engage in any deceptive “greenwashing” when they disclose the carbon footprints of their operations.
“It's very exciting, and it’s attracting a lot of interest from other countries,” Barrass says.
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“My understanding is it's going to be the first mandatory regime in the world.
“It’s exciting because it does again put New Zealand in a position where we are spearheading something that is going to be of great interest around the world,” Barrass adds. “It's an opportunity that shows how it can be done.”
Barrass, who has been in her new role for three weeks, says the FMA will be the regulator for the Government’s planned “fair conduct” laws, which will require every bank and insurer to have a programme detailing how they will treat their customers fairly.
David Clark, the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, hopes that law will be passed by Parliament by the end of this year.
“We have an important role to play in supporting the banks and insurers to develop the fair conduct programmes they need to have to make sure that their customers are getting good outcomes from their products and services,” Barrass says.
She says she’s confident the FMA will get the funding it needs to fulfil its expanding role.
In the 2020 financial year, it spent $39.2 million conducting its work. In the 2021 financial year, it spent $51.6m.
Barrass, who replaced fellow Briton Rob Everett as FMA chief executive, describes herself as an extrovert, which she says is unusual in the introverted world of regulation.
She also values empathy in regulation, and not only for the consumers regulators exist to protect.
“I think it’s very important that you can put yourself in the shoes of the people you are protecting, investors and consumers, but also the firms implementing regulation, that you understand and see things from their perspective.”
Effective regulation happens when the vast majority of regulated companies comply with regulations, and do so willingly, she says.
“It’s through the firms that the protection is delivered,” she says.
“Firms are full of human beings, and human beings make mistakes. Things go wrong. It’s really important if things go wrong that they pick up the phone and talk to us,” she says.
Barass joined the FMA from the UK where she spent most of the pandemic setting up a bank-funded Business Banking Resolution Service to which banks’ wronged small and medium business customers could complain about poor treatment from banks.
New Zealand has been on a decade-and-a-half journey to regulate financial services following a failed experiment letting the sector self-regulate, but some parts of the industry are relatively new to regulation.
“I come to this with a fairly clear-eyed view that there’s probably more work to do with insurers because they are later to the whole regulatory environment than some of the other institutions are,” Barrass says.
When getting her insurance in place after arriving, she found fewer protections than UK consumers have.
“I’m having to take a bit more care,” she says.
Though Barrass is English by birth, and her accent is that of the City of London, she spent most of her early years in New Zealand.
“I was born in the UK. Then my parents emigrated to New Zealand when I was seven, and I grew up here, went to university here, and spent the first five years of my career here,” she says. “Fifteen years in Christchurch, five years in Wellington.”
In her late 20s, she headed back to the UK to do a master’s degree, and did not return, except spending time here on maternity leave after each of her children were born.
“It feels like home,” she says.
Barrass has been getting te reo training, and says an important part of the FMA’s future will be developing its te ao Māori strategy.
Languages form one of the unique challenges the FMA faces.
New Zealand is “an importer of scams”, FMA director of regulation Liam Mason told Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee earlier this month, with many overseas crooks targetting specific groups, like the New Zealand immigrant Chinese community.
“We will do further work on how we reach people who are likely to be the victims of scams,” Barrass says.
English and te reo Māori were both key languages for the FMA, she said, but it was there to protect people from financial crime in all the languages of New Zealand’s diverse population.