Financial regulation is a form of regulation or supervision, which subjects financial institutions to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, aiming to maintain the stability and integrity of the financial system. This may be handled by either a government or non-government organization. Financial regulation has also influenced the structure of banking sectors by increasing the variety of financial products available. Financial regulation forms one of three legal categories which constitutes the content of financial law, the other two being market practices and case law.
The Capital Adequacy Directive was a European directive that aimed to establish uniform capital requirements for both banking firms and non-bank securities firms, first issued in 1993 and revised in 1998. These was superseded by the Capital Requirements Directives starting in 2006.
Operational risk is "the risk of a change in value caused by the fact that actual losses, incurred for inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems, or from external events, differ from the expected losses". This definition, adopted by the European Solvency II Directive for insurers, is a variation from that adopted in the Basel II regulations for banks. In October 2014, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision proposed a revision to its operational risk capital framework that sets out a new standardized approach to replace the basic indicator approach and the standardized approach for calculating operational risk capital.
Bank regulation is a form of government regulation which subjects banks to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, designed to create market transparency between banking institutions and the individuals and corporations with whom they conduct business, among other things. As regulation focusing on key actors in the financial markets, it forms one of the three components of financial law, the other two being case law and self-regulating market practices.
Basel II is the second of the Basel Accords,, which are recommendations on banking laws and regulations issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
A capital requirement is the amount of capital a bank or other financial institution has to have as required by its financial regulator. This is usually expressed as a capital adequacy ratio of equity as a percentage of risk-weighted assets. These requirements are put into place to ensure that these institutions do not take on excess leverage and risk becoming insolvent. Capital requirements govern the ratio of equity to debt, recorded on the liabilities and equity side of a firm's balance sheet. They should not be confused with reserve requirements, which govern the assets side of a bank's balance sheet—in particular, the proportion of its assets it must hold in cash or highly-liquid assets. Capital is a source of funds not a use of funds.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is a committee of banking supervisory authorities that was established by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten countries in 1974. The committee expanded its membership in 2009 and then again in 2014. In 2019, the BCBS has 45 members from 28 Jurisdictions, consisting of Central Banks and authorities with responsibility of banking regulation. It provides a forum for regular cooperation on banking supervisory matters. Its objective is to enhance understanding of key supervisory issues and improve the quality of banking supervision worldwide. The Committee frames guidelines and standards in different areas – some of the better known among them are the international standards on capital adequacy, the Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision and the Concordat on cross-border banking supervision. The Committee's Secretariat is located at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) hosts and supports a number of international institutions engaged in standard setting and financial stability, one of which is BCBS. Yet like the other committees, BCBS has its own governance arrangements, reporting lines and agendas, guided by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten (G10) countries.
The Capital Requirements Directives (CRD) for the financial services industry have introduced a supervisory framework in the European Union which reflects the Basel II and Basel III rules on capital measurement and capital standards.
The Solvency II Directive is a Directive in European Union law that codifies and harmonises the EU insurance regulation. Primarily this concerns the amount of capital that EU insurance companies must hold to reduce the risk of insolvency.
The Revised Payment Services Directive is an EU Directive, administered by the European Commission to regulate payment services and payment service providers throughout the European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA). The PSD directive's purpose was to increase pan-European competition and participation in the payments industry also from non-banks, and to provide for a level playing field by harmonizing consumer protection and the rights and obligations for payment providers and users. The key objectives of the PSD2 directive are creating a more integrated European payments market, making payments safer and more secure and protecting consumers.
Risk-weighted asset is a bank's assets or off-balance-sheet exposures, weighted according to risk. This sort of asset calculation is used in determining the capital requirement or Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) for a financial institution. In the Basel I accord published by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Committee explains why using a risk-weight approach is the preferred methodology which banks should adopt for capital calculation:
Basel III is a global, voluntary regulatory framework on bank capital adequacy, stress testing, and market liquidity risk. This third installment of the Basel Accords was developed in response to the deficiencies in financial regulation revealed by the financial crisis of 2007–08. It is intended to strengthen bank capital requirements by increasing bank liquidity and decreasing bank leverage.
The European Banking Authority (EBA) is a regulatory agency of the European Union headquartered in Paris. Its activities include conducting stress tests on European banks to increase transparency in the European financial system and identifying weaknesses in banks' capital structures. The EBA was established on 1 January 2011, upon which date it inherited all of the tasks and responsibilities of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS). After the United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union referendum the agency has relocated to Paris.
During the financial crisis of 2007–2008, several banks, including the UK's Northern Rock and the U.S. investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, suffered a liquidity crisis, due to their over-reliance on short-term wholesale funding from the interbank lending market. As a result, the G20 launched an overhaul of banking regulation known as Basel III. In addition to changes in capital requirements, Basel III also contains two entirely new liquidity requirements: the net stable funding ratio (NSFR) and the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR). On October 31, 2014, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued its final Net Stable Funding Ratio.
Basel IV is a contested term for the changes agreed in 2016 and 2017 to the international banking standards known as the Basel Accords. Regulators argue that these changes are simply completing the Basel III reforms, agreed in principle in 2010–11, although most of the Basel III reforms were agreed in detail at that time. The Basel Committee (BCBS) itself calls them simply "finalised reforms" and the UK Government has called them "Basel 3.1". Critics of the reform, in particular those from the banking industry, argue that Basel IV require a significant increase in capital and should be treated as a distinct round of reforms.
The Banking Union in the European Union is the transfer of responsibility for banking policy from the national to the EU level in several countries of the European Union, initiated in 2012 as a response to the Eurozone crisis. The motivation for banking union was the fragility of numerous banks in the Eurozone, and the identification of vicious circle between credit conditions for these banks and the sovereign credit of their respective home countries. In several countries, private debts arising from a property bubble were transferred to sovereign debt as a result of banking system bailouts and government responses to slowing economies post-bubble. Conversely, weakness in sovereign credit resulted in deterioration of the balance sheet position of the banking sector, not least because of high domestic sovereign exposures of the banks.
The European Union-wide banking stress test 2014 was conducted by the European Banking Authority in order to assess the resilience of financial institutions in the European Union to a hypothetical adverse market scenario. In total, 123 major EU banks participated in the exercise. 24 banks failed the test with an overall capital shortfall of EUR 24.2 billion under the adverse scenario.
The Credit Institutions Directive2013/36/EU is an EU law that aims to ensure banks are run prudently, and do not go insolvent. It was introduced as part of a package rules, following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, with the Capital Requirements Regulation 2013.
