Tracey McDermott, acting chief executive of the FCA, said: "While the presumption of responsibility could have been helpful, it was never a panacea. There has been significant industry focus on this one, small element of the reforms, which risked distracting senior management within firms from implementing both the letter and spirit of the regime."
The move had been described as effectively making senior staff whose juniors are found to have acted wrongly "guilty until proven innocent". It could have reversed the "burden of proof" onto the individual managers to show they didn't fail, rather than on prosecutors to prove that they did. It was one of a number of regulations, introduced following the credit crisis and subsequent scandals in the sector, aimed at greater punishment of white-collar crime.