The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) has issued for comment a draft guideline on banks’ regulatory capital disclosure requirements, OSFI announced on Thursday.
The draft guideline sets out the federal banking regulator’s expectations for implementing the latest version of disclosures required by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The revised requirements deal with the areas of credit risk, counterparty credit risk, market risk and securitization.
The revised requirements, “aim to address the problems identified through the financial crisis and to improve comparability and consistency of financial regulatory disclosures” by introducing more standardized disclosures between banks and across jurisdictions, the draft guideline says.
“In the wake of the financial crisis, it became apparent that the existing [Basel disclosure requirements] did not adequately promote the identification of internationally active banks material risks and did not provide sufficiently comparable information to enable market participants to assess a bank’s overall capital adequacy and to compare it with its peers,” the guideline says..
The updated requirements are expected to take effect in 2017 for Canada’s big banks. The other aspects of these regulatory disclosure requirements, such as banks’ liquidity coverage ratios, leverage ratios, composition of capital, market risk, operational risk and interest rate risk, will be covered in future revisions.
Banks will benefit from “additional clarity” on these regulatory disclosures, OSFI says in a statement, and the regulator is also considering whether all federally regulated firms should be subject to the full set of disclosure requirements, given the “increased volume and complexity” of these requirements.
Comments on the draft guideline are due by March 21.