WASHINGTON – Banking supervisors are already building on their existing relationships to accommodate differences in national jurisdictions and minimise burdens on banks arising from home-host issues in the Basel II bank capital rules, US Federal Reserve Board governor Susan Schmidt Bies said in September.

MELBOURNE, Australia – Australian regulators see no clear way forward for developing a framework for operating the pillar 2 supervisory review provisions of the Basel II rules for bolstering bank solvency.

PARIS – Europe’s Solvency II insurer safety rules could lead to excessively high capital requirements and double counting of risks because of an overly prudent approach, according to the Comité Européen des Assurances (CEA), the umbrella grouping for Europe’s national insurance industry trade bodies.

WASHINGTON – A Special Committee is being formed by the Institute of International Finance, which represents 340 banks and other financial firms around the world, to engage with bank regulators, and try to achieve better regulation in future. The initiative was announced by Cees Maas, IIF vice chairman and chief financial officer of Dutch bank and insurer ING Group, at the Institute’s annual meeting in late September.

LONDON – The proposed Basel II capital accord represents the most significant change in the banking regulatory environment in a generation. And the impact is likely to be most pronounced in Europe, especially among the second-tier and unlisted banks. This is because of the size, diversity and importance of the banking industry in Europe.

LONDON – The Association of British Insurers (ABI) and business intelligence and software firm SAS in September jointly launched the Operational Risk Insurance Consortium, or ORIC, to provide op risk data and analytics to the insurance industry. The aim is to assist the insurance industry with quantifying and managing operational hazards such as fraud, legal risk, technology failure and settlement failures.

NEW YORK – Less sophisticated banks, often with less developed risk management techniques, will have an incentive to invest in riskier assets under the proposed Basel II capital rules for securitisation. The possibility for a perverse outcome is one of the key conclusions of new research by credit rating agency Fitch Ratings into the impact of the proposed capital rules on the securitisation industry, which is one of the most rapidly expanding segments of the global finance industry.

BASEL, Switzerland – Some 30 countries are expected to take part between October and December in the planned fifth test of the complex, risk-focused Basel II bank capital rules that are designed to make the world’s banking system safer. Bankers and their regulators around the world will be anxious to see to what extent, if any, this international test will reflect the findings that so worried US regulators when they carried out their own national testing of the rules on US banks last year and earlier this year. The US results showed that the capital held by the 26 participating banks to absorb surprise losses could fall significantly, under proposed Basel II formulas, from the levels required under the current, and simpler, Basel I capital adequacy rules.

Rating agencies are upgrading South Africa\'s thriving banks. But new capital standard is big challenge to them and regulators.

Bank regulators in HK are highly regarded, but they face a series of problems in implementing Basel II, not least of which is the validation of internal ratings models