Unless it remains in the single market via membership of the EEA or is able otherwise to negotiate special access terms, after Brexit the UK will have to fall back on the third country provisions of EU financial services regulation. This paper examines the complexities of the current Union approach to the treatment of third countries and considers the likelihood of Brexit smoothing the progression towards a more unified EU system. The paper also considers what the evolution of the EU’s treatment of third countries is likely to mean for the UK as it seeks to negotiate continued access to the EU market. Finally, the paper explores new opportunities for the UK to innovate in regulatory design without impairing equivalence or undermining its commitment at the international level to global regulatory convergence.

The funds, entities, and regulators involved in the Australian superannuation industry together comprise a system that is complex and dynamic. The differentiation between roles and the distribution of responsibility amongst entities provides the system with a measure of resilience against the local failure of any one of the entities. However, the interconnections that bind and constitute the system also have the potential to transmit risks within the system, creating the potential for the impact of local failures to amplify through propagation, or in other ways to pose risks to the system as a whole. This article uses a new data set on 200 of Australia’s largest superannuation funds to map and assess those links and to identify the challenges those links pose to the scheme of prudential regulation applied to the superannuation system in Australia. It finds that the function of the entity and the legal form of the linkages, both of which are more variegated than typically occurs in banking sector transactions, crucially influences whether, and to what extent, various types of failures might be transmitted across the system. It also finds that we may be materially under-estimating the possibility that local failures in the superannuation system, which are a near certainty given the current regulatory risk appetite, will have a systemic impact. The findings have broad application across pension and institutional investment markets worldwide.