Tough UK rules for top bankers make business personal

Executives will be liable for banks’ misconduct under Senior Managers Regime

The SMR will create one of the world's strictest financial regimes

A year after the Libor scandal broke, John Hourican – recently resigned as chief executive of markets and international banking at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – went before the UK's Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and explained what had gone wrong.

Bank staff had toyed with the rate that is used to set payments on financial instruments with a total value put in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. And management's mistake had been "trusting people excessively", said Hourican.