But a simpler regime, perhaps borrowing from the philosophy of recent moves in Switzerland and the US, could make small firms stronger and more competitive at the same time. This is an area where we may have more room to manoeuvre following Brexit. 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  9  Action I’m worried that this may all sound rather theoretical to some of you, and some distance from the front line of providing banking services. So let’s come right back down to ground level and look at credit unions. Credit unions provide a vital service for their members, often acting as a backstop by allowing those members to access services they might find more difficult to get from banks and building societies. The sector plays an important role in many communities – particularly in Northern Ireland. Now credit unions, including those in Northern Ireland, may be relieved to hear that the hard-working PRA competition robot is not about to be unleashed upon them. As an aside, they may not know that they have been living with another of our robots for some time. A few years back some of our economists from the wider Bank of England teamed up with our credit union supervisors and found out that by using some different analytical techniques to study regulatory returns we could do a better job of predicting which credit unions would get into trouble next.9 This is highly relevant given we oversee around 440 credit unions with a team of 9 staff.
Third, 20 of the thresholds result from EU regulations and/or Basel definitions. The other 33 are things we have done ourselves here in the UK. Fourth, if we crudely translate non-asset thresholds into an asset equivalent in order to be able to map all thresholds on one scale, then most are concentrated in the area below a size corresponding to £ in assets or deposits. 3 This bears out the prediction made last year by former PRA Executive Director James Proudman that the PRA would soon develop a form of ‘cyborg supervision’ involving humans and machines working closely together. 4 To identify thresholds, the robot ran a series of textual searches on the dataset. The search combined quantitative values £ € expressions related to thresholds (eg. less/more than, greater/smaller than, up to); and typical metrics used for thresholds (eg. assets, balance sheet, deposits, accounts). It also included thresholds, such those on executive pay and exposures, that are only indirectly linked with size. The results were then cross-checked and cleaned by subject matter specialists. 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  One could make various observations about these findings. But one obvious question to ask is whether or not this is too complicated a picture. While it is a good thing for small firms that we exempt them from various bits of regulation, is there a case for making the gradient a bit easier to discern and climb as they grow? Should we rationalise and harmonise any of these thresholds?