Banking regulation and supervision refers to a form of financial regulation which subjects banks to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, enforced by a financial regulatory authority generally referred to as banking supervisor, with semantic variations across jurisdictions. By and large, banking regulation and supervision aims at ensuring that banks are safe and sound and at fostering market transparency between banks and the individuals and corporations with whom they conduct business.
Its main component is prudential regulation and supervision whose aim is to ensure that banks are viable and resilient (“safe and sound”) so as to reduce the likelihood and impact of bank failures that may trigger systemic risk. Prudential regulation and supervision requires banks to control risks and hold adequate capital as defined by capital requirements, liquidity requirements, the imposition of concentration risk (or large exposures) limits, and related reporting and public disclosure requirements and supervisory controls and processes.[1] Other components include supervision aimed at enforcing consumer protection, sometimes also referred to as conduct-of-business (or simply “conduct”) regulation and supervision of banks, and anti-money laundering supervision that aims to ensure banks implement the applicable AML/CFT framework. Deposit insurance and resolution authority are also parts of the banking regulatory and supervisory framework. Bank (prudential) supervision is a form of “microprudential” policy to the extent it applies to individual credit institutions, as opposed to macroprudential regulation whose intent is to consider the financial system as a whole.
