The Senior Supervisors Group (SSG) that comprises senior financial supervisors from seven countries (United States, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom) today issued a report that evaluates how weaknesses in risk management and internal controls contributed to industry distress during the financial crisis.
The report — Risk Management Lessons from the Global Banking
Crisis of 2008 — reviews in detail the funding and liquidity issues central to the recent crisis and explores critical areas of risk management practice in need of improvement across the financial services industry.
The report concludes that despite firms’ recent progress in improving risk management practices, underlying weaknesses in governance, incentive structures, information technology infrastructure and internal controls require substantial work to address.
The observations and conclusions in the report reflect the results of two initiatives undertaken by the SSG. These initiatives involved a series of interviews with firms about funding and liquidity challenges and a self-assessment exercise in which firms were asked to benchmark their risk management practices against a series of recommendations and observations taken from industry and supervisory studies published in 2008.
This report represents a joint effort of nine supervisory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Reserve in the United States. The other agencies are the Canadian Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, the French Banking Commission, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, the Japanese Financial Services Agency, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, and the U.K. Financial Services Authority.
These initiatives were conducted to support the priorities of the Financial Stability Board whose mission is to address vulnerabilities affecting the financial system and to promote global financial stability.
