Bluntly I think we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t do this – but at the same time the competition objective requires us to ride both horses at once. This is doable but it is tricky. It also raises an interesting question about the relative costs of supervising smaller firms versus higher FSCS levies to cover failures, which would merit further study. Fourth, how is technology going to affect all this? This is obviously a huge topic in its own right, and others here will touch on it so I will make only two brief comments. One, in my view the jury is still out on whether Open Banking and/or PSD2 are the gateway to a bigger change. Two, it is notable that some digital banks are making material inroads into the current account market – is this the leading edge of a bigger change, or not? Fifth, might Brexit create opportunities to move further on proportionality for smaller firms? I’ve already talked about the way in which we make the regime tougher for larger firms. This is entirely appropriate, but is not the same as saying we should have a weak prudential regime for smaller firms – indeed, I think that is the last thing we need both from a safety and soundness and a competition perspective. However, there may be a reasonable case that a simpler (simpler, not weaker) regime for small firms would advance both our safety and soundness and competition objectives.
Seven awkward questions Speech given at a roundtable to mark the fifth anniversary of the PRA's Secondary Competition Objective Sam Woods, Deputy Governor, Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer, Prudential Regulation Authority Bank of England Thursday 17 January 2019  1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  Thank you all very much for coming to our event today, and in particular to our panellists for agreeing to take part. Indeed, I speak on competition with a degree of humility in front of this panel – and particularly in front of Sir John because my first real engagement with these issues took place under his chairmanship when I was working for the Independent Commission on Banking back in 2010. For that reason, and in view of the expertise of this audience, you will be relieved to hear that I am going to avoid giving you a fifteen-minute-long list of all the things we’ve done over the last 5 years to advance our secondary competition objective. Of course I have to do a bit of that or I’m not doing my job! But I’ll just pick out a few items and keep it brief. Nor will I focus too much on some of the hardy perennials of this debate such as low switching rates, because I’m sure others on the panel can do better on those if we want to get into them.