Guildhall Chambers

Consumer credit, banking and financial services; commercial.

Lucy Walker has a specialist practice in financial services regulation and banking matters. She undertakes both contentious and non-contentious advisory work.

Lucy is an expert on the Consumer Credit Act and the mortgage and home finance regulatory regime. She has extensive experience advising on payment services, electronic money and the regulation of cryptoassets. Her work often involves advising off-shore and overseas banks and financial service providers on the UK regulatory perimeter.

Lucy also advises on the wider aspects of the financial services regulatory regime such as the FCA Consumer Duty, financial promotion issues, appointed representatives and intermediaries, asset and motor finance and retail banking issues, together with data protection and the UK GDPR as it relates to the banking and financial services sector.

She is particularly skilled at drafting user-friendly, ‘plain English’ customer – facing documentation for use in the financial services sector and advising on unfair contract terms in financial services documentation.

Called 2008, Lucy undertakes both contentious work and provides non contentious and strategic advice to consumer credit firms on all aspects of the consumer credit regulatory regime including:

• The FCA authorisation process for credit and consumer hire firms

• FCA supervision issues including consumer credit regulatory reporting and notification issues

• Financial promotions for credit and hire products

• Advising on regulated and exempt credit and hire agreements

• Drafting standard form documentation

• Post contractual matters including cancellation and the supply of post contractual information

• Default and enforcement procedures, including unfair relationships

• Regulatory enforcement action against credit and hire firms, including the imposition of requirements and limitations on Part 4A Permission

• Interrelationship between the consumer credit regulatory regime and the Part XX regime for exempt professional firms

• The regulatory regime for Crowd Funding and Peer to Peer (P2P) lending

• Judicial review of FCA and FOS consumer credit decisions

Lucy has wide experience advising banks and other regulated firms in relation to all aspects of the financial services regulatory regime, including the financial promotion regime, the promotion and regulation of crowd funding, peer to peer lending, cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets and in relation to payment services issues, including implementation of the revised Payment Services Directive and the Payment Services Regulations 2017. Lucy also advises on data protection issues including all aspects of the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation.

Middle Temple. Trainee Addleshaw Goddard; secondee, group legal Bank of Ireland; banking and finance group Osborne Clarke; pupil Guildhall Chambers; tenant Guildhall Chambers. Current directorships: Theatre Royal, Bath.

Bath High School GPDST; Trevelyan College, University of Durham (1994 BA Joint (Hons) History and Politics); College of Law, York (1995 CPE; 1996 Diploma in Law).