; in ensuring premiums, reserves and capital are prudent ; and in scanning the horizon for new risks and opportunities, that means we are minded to include both life and general insurance actuaries within the scope of our updated fit and proper regime for individuals in insurance. by including your profession in the new regime, we recognise the importance of your skills, the range of your contributions, and your personal propriety. later this year we will consult on a regime that includes the most senior actuaries – alongside ceos, chairmen and chief financial and risk officers – in our senior managers regime, making them directly accountable for how a firm is run, for their decisions, and for their actions. these senior persons will be expected to prove their fitness to regulators before they take up a role, and the onus will be on them to ensure risks are understood, measured and properly considered. right idea 3 : global standards for globally systemic insurers while much progress has been made on the home front, the focus of the global reform agenda since the crisis has been on putting a third idea into practice : common global standards for systemically important insurers. the goal of this work is to increase systemic resilience ; preventing spillovers from the failure of an insurer to the wider financial sector and the real economy. policymakers agree that traditional insurance activities need not of themselves be a source of systemic risk. indeed, recent events demonstrated three reasons why insurers are better able to withstand crises than other financial institutions. first, the underwriting cycle is generally not correlated with the business cycle ; second, the inherent resilience of business models that take a long - term view, and third, an insurer ’ s production cycle is inverted as they collect premiums today with a view to paying claims tomorrow. this model reduces liquidity risks and immunises insurers against risks of a run. insolvency takes time to manifest, and wind - down when it happens has historically been more orderly. given all that, you might ask : why the concern about systemic risk in insurance? the answer is simple : the financial crisis laid bare that the actions of some individual insurers – like aig – can have broad spillovers ; that some insurance markets – like the monolines – are systemic, and that the insurance sector plays a systemic role in diversifying the financial sector thereby reinforcing its resilience. aig was the extreme case of a systemic insurer.

try new approaches following our exit from the eu ; on the wall in front of the chair, new ideas on diversity and inclusion ; and on the ceiling hanging over it all, the storm clouds of climate change. plus of course solvency ii, which is resistant to being included in any form of analogy. behind the chair but before coming to any of those things, unbeknownst to you the prudentist has in fact used some of the covid lockdown to check her own teeth and try out some new tools on herself before starting in on yours. i can assure you that if you employ hundreds of people whose main job is to identify the weak spots in institutions, then when you step back a take a good look at yourself it is not an easy process! nonetheless, through a thorough check - up of the pra we have identified some ways in which we think we can improve our work going forward, with an eye to being as effective and efficient as possible. much of this is about internal improvements of the kind which will be familiar to many of you from your own change programmes, across areas such as flexible resourcing, organisational design, the consistency of operations across silos and how well we use data and 1 / 5 bis central bankers'speeches technology. but two areas may be of broader interest : the significant change we need to make as we take on a fuller rule - making role following brexit ; and an increased emphasis we intend to place on ease of exit. ease of exit starting with ease of exit, this is of course a very important thing to consider when you visit the dentist – just in case they turn out to be the kind of dentist who appears in marathon man. we of course aim to be a more sensible and reasonable prudentist, but the question of ease of exit for our patients has nonetheless become more pressing through time. a well - functioning and competitive market is one in which firms can enter and exit easily. our competition objective leads us to pay particular attention to this, significantly more i would say than prudential regulators without such an objective. i have frequently bored this audience with the very long list of things we have done to encourage entry, particularly into retail and sme banking markets given the competition issues in them. i will resist the urge to do this again but confine myself to making the simple point that in the 8 or so years since its creation the pra has authorised 61 new banks, of which 28 are