Strategic Priority 2: Embed risk-focused choices throughout our work

Traditionally, regulators tend to allocate resources in line with the size of the businesses they regulate. Making risk-focused choices is about focusing our resources on those businesses that pose the greatest risk. Sometimes this is about how large a business is, but sometimes it is not.

Making more risk-focused choices requires strong data management and coordinated judgement of risk issues. We have made significant progress in this area, but we have more work to do to calibrate our approach.

As we evolve, we will continue to embed risk-focused choices in everything we do. The benefits will be that the choices we make will be more robust, more consistent and more transparent.

We have carefully developed our supervisory risk model over the past three years and, during the course of our strategic journey, we will fully deploy its capabilities to enhance the interactions we have with all businesses. We will also test how well our risk model works and develop it further. This will focus our engagements and enhance our ability to act effectively when intervention is required.

We will extend our well-developed risk approach to the Companies Registry, our policy development activities and our internal risk management so that we focus on what matters most.

Over the next four years, we will make major enhancements to our data management. This will enable us to build our capabilities as an effective supervisor and tailor our responses to the risks that businesses are facing. By 2023, our efforts to embed risk-focused choices throughout our work will ensure that Industry’s engagement with us addresses those emerging operational risks, such as cyber, culture and artificial intelligence.

Rolling out risk systems across all our activities

• We will deploy our risk model fully across all businesses
• We will tailor interactions with businesses based on the risk data we collect
• We will build at least two more advanced iterations of our risk system over the next four years.

Using data more effectively to inform our decisions

• We will plan our activities around increasingly quantitative measures and we will continuously test and refine their effectiveness
• We will automate more processes so that we focus our people on complex matters and increase efficiencies
• We will restructure how we hold data so that we have the advantages of a fully integrated data management approach across both regulation and our Registry
• We will develop our data analytics and management function.

Managing the regulatory risk of innovation

• We will proactively support existing businesses and innovative start-ups so they understand our regulatory framework and how it applies to emerging technologies
• We will continue to integrate our approach to innovative businesses across our Registry and authorisation functions
• We will explore new ways to work with Industry on products new to the market.