in summary, the prism framework will help us challenge ourselves and our firms in a constructive fashion. it will help us form consistent judgements about the risks firms pose to our objectives of financial stability and consumer protection and, having established what those risks are, it will help us formulate appropriate mitigation steps and monitor the success of that mitigation. we will work to ensure that we supervise all types of financial firm in an appropriate fashion but we will never be infallible – we cannot guard society against all risks. our objective with the prism framework is to give ourselves the best chance to guard against the most severe threats to financial stability and consumers in the future. thank you for your attention. bis central bankers ’ speeches

perceive this to be a potential risk – that funds are treated like insurers and insurers like domestic banks. thirdly, prism will be proportionate. it is a firm - centric approach which will mean that the actions are tailored to the firm in question, with the sharing of risk ratings and the risk mitigation programme giving each firm clarity around our individually tailored supervisory agenda and depending on the firm ’ s impact rating to us. of course, none of the above means that firms will necessarily like what we say any more than they have done in the recent past. prism means that individual firms can expect us to be consistently challenging and assertive when we judge there to be risks to financial stability and consumers which require mitigation. don ’ t be too thin skinned about this. some in industry would doubtless like us to revert to pre - crisis approaches to regulation but i ’ d suggest that – rather than railing against what is in fact a new global supervisory approach – they work with us to adapt to the new reality. timing shaping the way an organisation operates takes time. we have already been using some aspects of the prism framework, such as risk governance panels and an increased focus on challenge and risk mitigation for many months. that said, today marks the formal launch of our new prism framework for supervision. we switched on the prism application which supports the framework last week and we will be applying it to banks and insurers from now onwards. bis central bankers ’ speeches we will develop the application further and roll it out to investment firms and credit unions in may next year and there will be more development in the later part of next year to ensure that prism can help supervisors undertaking focused thematic inspection work across a significant number of firms. we plan for it to evolve as supervisory requirements evolve and we will be developing the framework and application to, for example, incorporate key solvency ii supervisory activities and metrics at an appropriate juncture. supervising low impact firms so far this evening i ’ ve focused mainly on how prism is going to help us supervise the high to medium - low impact firms where we have some capacity to undertake proactive work focused on individual firms. as i promised at the beginning of this speech, i would now like to return to low impact firms, to set out how we are going to deal with these firms going forward. i appreciate that it ’ s all too easy to think they will, in some sense, be neglected. i can assure you they