form of seminars and roundtable discussions. in all these areas, i want firms at the gateway to be engaging with modern, efficient, and streamlined processes. however, we do have an ask of you. we need to hear from you on where unnecessary frictions remain, and where industry would welcome further engagement or guidance. please continue to provide us with your feedback and suggestions, either directly when engaging via regulatory transactions, or with your supervisors, or through our annual firm feedback survey [ 12 ], or by continuing to feed in through industry bodies like our hosts today. we also need to hear from you to understand how firms are adapting to a changing environment, and what this might mean for our regulatory relationship. this facilitates an honest two - way conversation between regulator and firm, ensuring that we continue to operate a regulatory landscape that forward looking. beyond guidance and metrics, the way in which we use data is pivotal to ensure operational effectiveness. last year during a speech at uk finance [ 13 ] i spoke about being in the foothills of a new digital era. as the industry responds to developments such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and new business models such as banking as a service, we will make sure our approach to authorising transactions related to any of that adapts as necessary, and that we accommodate novel and innovative solutions without causing delays. back to our ask of you, i will take this opportunity to emphasise that data remains an area of focus for the pra. the submission of complete, timely, and accurate regulatory information, whether as part of an authorisation application or for ongoing supervision, is what allows us to function effectively. we welcome any feedback on how we can further clarify what we need. but ultimately it is down to firms to make sure they have the systems and controls required to give us the necessary information. if they can ’ t, well that ’ s a problem they need to fix, rather than expect we will wave things through. we won ’ t. senior managers & certification regime earlier, i referenced the on - going review of the senior managers & certification regime ( smcr ), and i want to touch on this now, as i know many of you will have engaged with our discussion paper about it earlier this year [ 14 ]. in december 2022, the government announced, as part of the edinburgh reforms, that his majesty ’ s treasury ( hmt ), the fca, and the pra would review the senior managers regime. we received over 90

fit under this approach. as one of my colleagues in insurance supervision said last year, come and talk to us, and you might be surprised at the difference between reality and perception in how swift and proportionate the process can be [ 6 ]. looking beyond new firms, our ability to effect changes in who controls a firm is also important for smooth market functioning. and indeed, the events of this year, notably the fates of credit suisse and silicon valley bank, illustrated that we can and do act fast to maintain financial stability. we will shortly be publishing a joint consultation paper with the fca relating to change in control, setting out proposals to replace the eu guidelines on the prudential assessment of acquisitions and changes of ownership, which we think will bring helpful transparency to firms. finally, we are also engaged with hm treasury and the fca on a review of the senior managers & certification regime, as part of the edinburgh reforms [ 7 ], and i will set out in more detail in a moment how that will contribute to our objectives. these examples are just a flavour of the work we are doing to support innovation in financial services, to clarify expectations, and to deliver a streamlined process for regulatory transactions. as you will hopefully take from my comments, the pra very much welcomes its new secondary competitiveness and growth objective. it gives us a powerful momentum in support of quite a bit of thinking we have been developing in recent years. operational performance now let me turn to operational performance. we know that effective engagement with firms on regulatory transactions is one of the most important contributions that we can make towards our competitiveness objective. these transactions all begin through engagement with the authorisations function, whether this be via our pre - application routes ; a formal regulatory transaction ; or a regulatory query. it does not matter if you are a systemic bank or a friendly society – a transaction commences in the same way, and we strive to ensure all our firms are treated in a proportionate and effective manner. we know that firms care a lot about clarity and certainty when it comes to their engagement with us. sam woods also recognised this in december 2022 [ 8 ], acknowledging that greater transparency on our performance will give you the confidence that we continue to transform our operations. so operational performance has been a major area of focus for us in recent years, and i am pleased to say that these improvements have been borne out in the performance metrics that we now publish [ 9 ]. but here too,