Senior European officials agreed this week to guidelines allowing UK banks "appropriate access" to the EU financial services market after Brexit, reports the FT. The guidelines will be officially adopted by EU leaders later this week. The FT says the guidelines underline that Britain's access to the EU will depend on so-called "equivalence" rules that non-EU countries use to access the EU financial services market, and adds that the document calls for the equivalence system to be "reviewed and improved". UK officials have been concerned that the current equivalence system is too fragmented and unstable to underpin their access to the EU market post-Brexit. The European Commission is likely to toughen its assessments of whether countries should be granted equivalence (taking greater account of whether they pose a financial stability threat). A blog post by Bank of England staff has revealed that, since the GFC, the UK's prudential regulator has been sending much more detailed and strongly-worded letters to banks about their performance and risks. Letters from the Prudential Regulation Authority to the UK's biggest and/or riskiest banks tend to be personally addressed to a named individual within the bank. "Letters to these banks are typically longer than those written to lower-category banks, and they tend to be more personalised. They are often addressed to a named individual ('Dear Katy') and these salutations are often hand-written," the blog says.