Sam Woods: Seven awkward questions

Speech by Mr Sam Woods, Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation of the Bank of England and Chief Executive of the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), at a roundtable to mark the fifth anniversary of the PRA's Secondary Competition Objective, London, 17 January 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
17 January 2019

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.