A specialist legal services regulatory consultancy has branched out into financial services regulation in response to a growing number of clients spanning both sectors.
Passmore & Oliver Partners, founded last year by two former senior figures at the Solicitors Regulation Authority, today announced that the new practice would be led by a former Financial Conduct Authority figure. Alex Roy, who joins the firm on 1 September, spent eight years at the FCA, working across banking, payments, insurance and retail investment. He joins from Big Four firm EY, where he led the regulatory insights function. Earlier in his career he was head of development and research at the Legal Services Board.
Passmore was executive director of the SRA and Oliver a former deputy chief executive and general counsel at the regulator
Passmore & Oliver’s founders, Crispin Passmore and Juliet Oliver, said the expansion responds to the way in which their legal sector clients work: law firms offering financial services as exempt professional firms, claims management businesses alongside their practice, or group structures spanning both sectors, who need one adviser fluent in both rulebooks.
’Financial services and legal services have never really been separate worlds for the clients we work with,’ said Passmore. ’Alex has sat inside the FCA, inside a Big Four regulatory practice, and inside the legal sector’s own regulator. That combination is genuinely rare, and it means we can now offer one team that speaks fluently across both perimeters.’
Roy added: ’Crispin and Juliet have built exactly the kind of firm I wanted to join: senior people doing the work themselves, with low overheads and no bureaucracy. That means we can bring deep regulatory expertise to bear directly on the commercial issues our clients face.’
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