BoE's Carney looks at global approach for revoking banker licences

By Huw Jones

LONDON, March 10 (Reuters) - British regulators are looking at whether global agreement is possible on revoking licences of bankers who break rules, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said on Tuesday.

The Bank is part of Britain's fair and effective markets review (FEMR) to raise conduct standards after banks were fined for trying to rig currency and interest rate benchmarks.

Bankers can change jobs frequently and work in different parts of the world, making it difficult for one country to go it alone with new rules.

Carney said the threat of revoking a banker's licence to trade if they violate standards or codes was a key incentive to improving behaviour.

"FEMR, at the request of industry, is looking quite closely on that and to what extent that can be coordinated internationally," he told a committee in parliament's upper chamber.

Carney also chairs the Financial Stability Board, the regulatory task force that is coordinating a welter of new rules for banks on behalf of the Group of 20 economies (G20).

Last year, he suggested that bankers could also be partly paid in performance bonds to reduce risk-taking but lawyers argued it could clash with European Union rules on remuneration.

On Tuesday, he clarified that any such plans would work within the European rules.

Members of the parliamentary committee said allegations that the Swiss arm of HSBC helped people dodge tax in the past showed that some banks had become too big to manage.

Carney said new rules to ensure a bank can be wound down quickly if it goes bust was already forcing banks to simplify their global structures and have clearer lines of responsibility.

Banks will have to show they can still be profitable when they apply new, stricter UK banker accountability standards in all their overseas operations as well, Carney said.

"That has to be shown ... we want to be satisfied that that is the case for these complex, global institutions," Carney said.

The scaling back of investment banking operations at some UK banks was not bad for the City of London (LSE: CIN.L - news) 's position as a major global financial centre, Carney also told the committee.

In addition, efforts to make sure that banks in Britain are well capitalised means they are better able to lend to companies, even though the banks have argued that the opposite is the case.

"In most cases those have been hollow threats," Carney said. (Reporting by Huw Jones. Editing by Jane Merriman)