Looking both ways Speech given by Sam Woods, Deputy Governor, Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer, Prudential Regulation  Remarks prepared for the May 2017 Building Society Association (BSA) Annual Conference Published 10 July 2017  I planned to deliver an abridged version of this speech at the BSA conference on 3 May but had to withdraw my participation due to election purdah. I am grateful to Kayleigh Guinan, Eric Engstrom, Nick Lock, Louise Oscarius and Alex Holmes for their assistance in preparing this text. I am also grateful to David Kynaston and John Fforde, on whose work I have drawn heavily. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  The theme of the BSA’s conference is the future – the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for building societies and what it means to be a modern mutual. Now, being forward-looking is great and we have indeed built that into the most basic foundations of the PRA’s approach. But only looking forward would be unwise, given history’s ability to repeat itself. We need to look both ways. In that context, I want to talk about supervision and why it matters - supervision, as distinct from regulation. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are quite different. Regulation concerns the framework of rules and legal standards which govern the way in which firms operate. Systems of regulation, even if self-regulating, have been around for a good number of years in a wide variety of sectors, from media to energy to education.
We work diligently to respond to the challenge, while paying attention to the two points of communication – immediate communication with the public and communication with the media. We do our best to follow the best practices of the European  central banking union, which is largely confirmed with the assessments of our transparency. In doing so, we not only struggle to increase intensity, but also quality of our communication. Here I would mention the practice of constantly improving the quality of information and analyses we publish, improving the methodological explanations for the statistics that we publish, timely informing of all novelties in statistical surveys, improving the structure of our website, concurrent publishing of statistics and statistical press releases for their explanation, providing international comparability of our data through continuous implementation of international standards. In this regard, we are in the final stage of creating an analytical tool for easier access and search of statistics by all external users. We hope that our commitment is noticeable for you as media representatives, who analyze our work on a daily basis, by following the press releases, data and positions that arise from the central banking operations in the country. For us, you, the journalists, are one of the main conveyors of monetary policy messages to the public. Not as our spokespersons, but as individuals and professionals respected by the public, who daily follow our work, which is very often presented in tables, graphs, reviews and data series that almost always require focused reading and analysis before being commented.