Welcome to the August 2026 edition of Travers Smith's Quarterly Listed Company Update. This issue highlights the latest regulatory developments and guidance relevant to listed companies, as well as key trends and practical points for consideration in the coming months.

The message from Dame Anne Glover at Travers Smith's 5th annual Alternative Insights Summit last month was direct: UK pension funds should invest more in early-stage venture and growth stage capital. The figures certainly support that view.

Signs of a marked acceleration in UK sanctions enforcement continue to emerge. In the months since our last update, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation ("OFSI") has now deployed its new settlement scheme across multiple cases, imposed penalties on both UK and non-UK entities (including where proactive approaches to establishing ownership and control linkages to designated persons were not taken), and signalled clearly that its enforcement focus will extend beyond Russia to other sanctions regimes - most notably, Iran.

A chatbot that sounds human, an image generator that produces photorealistic content, a voice cloning tool - they all make it harder to distinguish machine-produced content from human-created work. The risks of sophisticated generative and interactive AI - misinformation, manipulation at scale, impersonation, and fraud - are growing.

A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry 

Every firm carrying out payment, e-money or banking services in the UK should pay close attention to the consultation paper titled Modernising Payment Services Regulation (the CP), published by His Majesty's Treasury (HMT) on 14 July 2026. While Bastille Day may not have been a deliberate choice of publication date (and we are not cynical enough to suggest that there is a pre-summer holiday race to publish taking place among policymakers), it is suitably appropriate, as this paper may herald a genuine revolution in the regulation of payments in the UK.

The draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill was published in January 2026 and has been controversial from the start. One of its key aims is to cap ground rents in existing long residential leases at £250 a year from an implementation date in late 2028, reducing in 2068 to a peppercorn.  This follows from a previous consultation under the last Conservative government in 2023/24 which weighed up five different options for tackling excessive ground rents.

On 4 June this year, HMRC quietly updated its published guidance in relation to input tax recovery for defined benefit (DB) pension schemes. These changes to HMRC's internal VAT Input Tax Manual clarify an improved position for the way in which input tax on asset management costs can be recovered, but appear to make recovery of input tax on administration costs more difficult.