Supervisory statement
A regulator's published statement of the expectations it holds firms to and how it will judge compliance with its rules.
A supervisory statement is a publication in which a regulator sets out what it expects of firms and how it will judge whether they comply with its rules. In the UK the term has a specific meaning at the Prudential Regulation Authority, whose policy material comes as rules, supervisory statements (SS) and statements of policy. The PRA Rulebook describes supervisory statements as documents that "set flexible frameworks for firms, incorporating new and existing expectations."
The distinction matters when you build an obligations record. A rule is a legal requirement. A supervisory statement is not a rule, but it tells you what supervisors will look for, and a firm that takes a different approach should be ready to show how it still meets the expectation. In practice, much of the detail supervisors test lives in supervisory statements rather than in the rules they interpret.
SS1/21, Operational resilience: impact tolerances for important business services is a good example. First published on 29 March 2021, with the current version dated 11 March 2022 and effective from 31 March 2022, it sets out the PRA's expectations for how banks, building societies, PRA-designated investment firms and insurers identify their important business services and set impact tolerances for them. See operational resilience.
Supervisory statements are numbered by sequence and year and are updated in place, so the version date is part of the citation. Three habits keep them under control:
- Track them as their own source type, separate from rules and from letters such as a Dear CEO letter.
- Record the version you mapped your controls to, and remap when the PRA publishes an update, usually after a consultation paper.
- Link each expectation to an owner and to evidence, as you would for a rule.
EU authorities use similar instruments to align national supervisors; ESMA, for example, issued a supervisory briefing on the authorization of crypto-asset service providers in January 2025.
This entry is general information, not legal advice.
