The best help Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority can give on payday lending is to diminish the need for payday borrowings.

Sir, in “Payday lending”, December 7, you refer to Britain’s new Financial Conduct Authority to be given powers to cap the cost and duration of loans that target the low-paid and vulnerable. 

But the truth is that in terms of the accumulated amounts of excessive interest all vulnerable have to pay, nothing beats what the normal bank borrowers perceived as “The Risky” need to pay in extra interests to the banks, just in order to make up for the fact that bank regulators, for no particular good reason at all, allow banks to hold less capital when lending to “The Infallible”. 

If these regulatory discrimination which make access to bank credit so much scarcer and onerous that they would ordinary be for ‘The Risky”, those which includes small businesses and entrepreneurs, is eliminated, then they would perhaps not be so much need for payday loans. 

In July 2012 I registered a complaint on this with the Financial Ombudsman Service in UK, so I guess I might need to re-register it with the Financial Conduct Authority.