Global Risk Regulator Podcast

The European Securities and Markets Authority has a broad remit bringing it into contact with many areas of financial markets, at the wholesale and retail level. In this episode of GRR’s regulatory podcast series, Verena Ross, chair of ESMA provides insights into the authority’s work around: ESG and curbing greenwashingAnalysing and collecting markets data relating to regulations such as MiFID Challenges around implementing and future proofing DORA and MiCAThe Benchmarks Regulation and its impact on third country benchmark providersFinancial stability and the role of non-financial bank intermediation ESMA’s work with third country regulators and global standard setters The biggest challenges facing securities regulators over the next five years  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stablecoins have seen explosive growth in the last year with the Bank for International Settlements estimating that as of late 2021, there were $120bn of them in circulation.This has caught the attention of regulators who are pondering whether these instruments will revolutionize finance in a beneficial way for society or could become a major financial systemic threat.To address those issues is Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle - an issuer of the USDC dollar stablecoin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The rise of blockchain and crypto assets are going to profoundly influence the future development of financial services and are naturally of great interest to supervisors. How supervisors decide to regulate crypto will in itself play a major role in how traditional financial services adapt to this new phenomenon. This episode looks at the approaches being taken in the EU, UK, US and some other jurisdictions and how it might impact the transition of crypto into mainstream finance. It also looks at how the recent consultation by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision on the prudential treatment of crypto exposures will influence banks. Exploring these issues is Yves Longchamp, head of research at SEBA Bank, a Swiss bank providing a bridge between traditional and digital assets and Lavan Thasarathakumar, the regulatory affairs director EMEA at Global Digital Finance, an association advocating for digital assets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The potential introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could potentially upend bank business models depending on their design and implementation. It’s a topic, which has implications well beyond monetary policy and the nature of money. The rapid rise in the popularity of crypto currencies such as bitcoin, Facebook's plans around creating stablecoins backed by existing national currencies and the growing digitisation of financial services has prompted central banks to seriously investigate the viability of introducing CBDCs.One central bank that has been very active in investigating this area through Project Helvetia, is the Swiss National Bank (SNB) along with its collaborators the Bank for International Settlements and the SIX Exchange. To gain a better understanding of project Helvetia, the possible impact of CBDCs on capital markets, clearing, foreign exchange and governance we approached Martin Schlegel, an alternate member of the board at the Swiss National Bank for his insights. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) are undoubtedly going to remain one of the most high profile topics impacting policy and financial regulation for years to come. ESG brings with it a whole set of new data, disclosure and reporting requirements meaning there is a great deal of work to do to create new frameworks. There is also a strong agenda among international bodies to create standards that work across borders for investors and issuers of securities alike.  It is against this backdrop that The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) is looking to create global ESG reporting guidelines and standards in a bid to make it easier for market participants to identify and compare ESG risks between individual securities and financial products.    In this episode, Paul Andrews, the Secretary General of IOSCO, discusses a wide range of topics such as the fragmentation of ESG standards, data quality issues, working with other global bodies, ESG ratings, greenwashing and the likely timeline for upcoming IOSCO reports and consultations.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Singapore is famous globally for its enthusiasm for technology and for pushing the envelope in this area. The Monetary Authority of Singapore very much follows in that tradition and is a pioneer in the use of supervisory technology (SupTech). It has a raft of projects designed to turn itself into the most advanced technology driven central bank in the world as it steadily digitises many of its functions. These range from fundamentally rethinking how data is harvested from financial firms and analysed for important insights through to detecting and disrupting money laundering activities. In this episode, Vincent Loy, Assistant Managing Director (Technology) at the Monetary Authority of Singapore discusses these various projects and their aims.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Following the 2007-9 global financial crisis - the Basel framework underwent significant revisions. It’s partly thanks to these changes that banks entered the Covid-19 pandemic induced crisis in a robust condition. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how deep and prolonged the current downturn will be and how many bad loans banks will notch up in the process. Therefore, could there be further revisions to the Basel framework? Particularly if the current crisis turns out to be particularly bad and badly damages the financial sector? Also, the world is far more divided than it was on the eve of the last financial crisis. How might this impact supervisory cooperation, deliberations within the Basel Committee and adherence to the Basel framework. And lastly, what impact might sustainable finance and climate change have on prudential frameworks? Addressing these topics is Bill Coen, former secretary general of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and chair of the IFRS Advisory Council. He also sits on the board of directors of the Toronto Centre, a global non-profit organisation that provides leadership training in financial supervision. Also, sharing his views is Paul Sharma, a Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal and was a Deputy Head of the Prudential Regulation Authority and a former member of the Basel Committee Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The economic fall-out from the Covid-19 pandemic is the first major test for the IFRS-9 accounting standard, which only came into force in 2018. Global Risk Regulator chaired a discussion about how banks are interpreting the IFRS-9 standard, what approaches they’re taking to forward provisioning for bad loans and how they’re accounting for regulatory guidance around how they should provision for non-performing loans. The two experts who took part in the discussion were Jane Fuller who is a co-director at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation and a fellow at the CFA Institute UK and Damien Burke who is a partner at the credit risk consultancy, 4Most.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.