With 17 days until formally leaving the Financial Services Authority (FSA), John Tiner, its chief executive, was showing signs of going demob happy yesterday. In a farewell speech to City dignitaries, he departed from the official FSA policy script to call for the regulator to take on additional responsibilities and used the occasion to take a swipe at irritants over the years.

It was an uncharacteristically outspoken performance for a man who stayed on piste in his public pronouncements after his colleagues were roughed up by MPs on the Treasury Select Committee during the split capital trust scandal. The FSA management was accused of being asleep on the job at the time, but since then Mr Tiner has presided over a generally improving reputation for the lead City regulator, winning grudging respect from policymakers and the institutions he has had to regulate.

Mr Tiner joined the FSA in 2001 after 25 years with Arthur Andersen, the soon-to-be defunct accounting and consulting firm. Two years later he was promoted to succeed Sir Howard Davies.

It was the depths of the bear market. Life companies were struggling with their solvency ratios. Split-cap victims were demanding justice and scalps.

However, the benign path of markets over the next four years and the FSA’s popular decision to embrace principles-based regulation – as distinct from a rules-based regime – won him fans in the City and the envy of more harshly regulated overseas jurisdictions.

There have been disappointments – not least from small regulated firms, which complain that red tape and lack of guidance from Canary Wharf is a nightmare. Frustration with the limits of his powers also showed in other comments. Mr Tiner called for the body to be given a fifth statutory objective: to promote competition in the financial services industry. He suggested that responsibility for regulating the consumer credit activities of banks, building societies and other FSA-authorised firms should be transferred to the FSA. He also lamented the FSA’s caving-in to industry pressure in 2002, when it last tried to make independent financial advisers more independent of their paymasters.

Aged 49, he has said he wants one more big job in the private sector and, after six months of compulsory gardening leave, there will doubtless be plenty of offers.