Adopting the national regime of the integrated financial supervision has been a recent trend for the last two decades in many countries in the world. When we focus on financial supervision in the narrow sense of the word, the integration implies monop...
Adopting the national regime of the integrated financial supervision has been a recent trend for the last two decades in many countries in the world. When we focus on financial supervision in the narrow sense of the word, the integration implies monopolizing financial supervision. When we focus however broadly on the functioning of the financial system as a whole in a country, such a regime strengthens the case for cooperation and coordination between the safety net participants.
Look at the financial safety net of a country. It typically consists of three core functions - financial regulation/supervision, lender-of-last-resort and deposit insurance functions. Normally, the supervisory agency (agencies), the central bank, the deposit insurance agency, and the government (usually ministry of finance), participate in the net, and each of them is charged with a proper mandate. Although their mandates are closely related to but differentiated from each other, they all are, by nature, contributory to financial stability. The public agencies that participate in the financial safety net are thus regarded as being responsible for the financial system. As each agency with a differentiated mandate comes to exercise a correspondingly differentiated set of functions and powers, institutional points of view may differ across the public agencies and in some cases there may appear interest conflicts between them. Hence arises the need for cooperation mainly in the form of information-sharing and for coordination through checks and balances between these agencies with a view to achieving systemic stability finally.
Disappointingly, however, some emerging market economies including Korea often appear to suffer some kind of confusion and/or ignorance regarding what such cooperation and coordination really mean. In addition, it often seems likely that politically-motivated logic may generate distortions in institutional structure of financial supervision there.
This paper attempts to explore how those agencies responsible for the financial system, the central bank and the supervisory agency in particular, may cooperate and coordinate with each other and achieve financial stability efficiently and effectively.
We review the general MoUs agreed between the public agencies respectively in the United Kingdom, Australia, Norway and Sweden as well as the special MoUs on financial examinations that are in use respectively in the United States and in Korea. Our review shows that each country makes use of a certain subset of the following set of the methods and arrangements for institutional cooperation and coordination:
● regimes of financial regulation and supervision
● standing committees consisting of the public agencies concerned
● clarified division of responsibilities and tasks
● financial examinations and meetings thereof between the public agencies involved
● cross board membership between central banks and financial supervisors
● secondment of staff between central banks and financial supervisors
● information sharing
● prior consultation on policy changes
● regular meetings (or joint committees) at executives and/or deputies level between
central banks and financial supervisors
● various agreements in the form of general or special MoUs, or in the form of
Implementation Guidelines
● joint development of special expertise through a working group consisting of staff
from the central bank and from the supervisory agency.
During the review of each MoU, we have tried to relate, if applicable, a particular arrangement for cooperation and coordination to a country-specific historical, socio-economic, cultural, political, or a legal context. We have also compared and contrasted the arrangements for cooperation and coordination between those public agencies across a group of countries with the general MoUs and across those with the special MoUs. Policy implications to Korea are also discussed.