Press Release No. 12/301

The scope and intensity of the recent financial crisis, and the significant risks posed by financial institutions viewed as too important to fail, have brought to the fore the importance of strengthened financial sector regulatory reform to make the financial system safe. In this context, the IMF organized today a one-day seminar at the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute to take stock of progress on refining the regulatory framework and to define the current challenges in the design of the reform agenda, particularly in the Asian context.

The seminar—titled Evolving Financial Regulatory Framework—is part of an extended series of events in advance of the October 2012 IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings in Tokyo, Japan. Panelists and participants, who included officials from central banks and regulatory agencies in Asia, private sector representatives, academics, journalists and IMF staff, discussed key issues in global regulation pertaining to both banks and capital market intermediation. They also discussed how the Asia-Pacific region is prepared to deal with the changes envisaged in the international regulatory framework as well as the future directions and implications for the financial system in the region.

Participants agreed that the regulatory reform agenda was still a work in progress and highlighted some of the implementation challenges and unintended consequences of regulation that may arise. Issues that drew particular attention were related to the impact of new capital and liquidity regulations; supervision and resolution of systemically important financial institutions (both banks and nonbanks); home-host cooperation; potential extra-territoriality arising from national initiatives; and implications from new regulation on capital market-related intermediation.