Restructuring Financial Sector Supervision: Creating a Level Playing Field

During the past few years, the financial industry has been characterised by an ongoing cross-sector and cross-border consolidation of financial institutions spanning banking, securities, and insurance institutions and the blurring demarcation of their respective products and instruments. Against the backdrop of these changes, the creation of a level playing field for financial services has become a key challenge for policy makers, regulators, and market participants alike. At different national and international levels, regulators, and supervisors have been responding to this challenge with a plethora of measures. This paper presents a number of initiatives at different supervisory levels in view of recent financial sector developments and discusses how the challenge of a level playing field is being tackled. The Geneva Papers (2009) 34, 9–23. doi:10.1057/gpp.2008.36