The Central Bank has reported on some of its major initiatives that will continue over the course of this year, including collaboration with other regulatory agencies on the creation of a National Financial Crisis Management Plan.
The report noted that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave assistance to this effort through a "technical assistance mission on crisis resolution powers, including the creation of a roadmap for establishing a legal and regulatory framework for bank resolution".
In an effort to further mitigate the risks to the banking sector, the bank reported that during the fourth quarter of 2013, the formal rollout of the Basel II and III Implementation Programs, which are slated to be executed in three phases over a 30-month timeline, began.
Basel II, initially published in June 2004, was intended to create an international standard for banking regulators to control how much capital banks need to put aside to guard against the types of financial and operational risks banks face. Such risks could, in turn, affect the whole economy if not mitigated. Basel III, also known as the Third Basel Accord, is a global, voluntary regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and market liquidity risk. Basel III was supposed to strengthen bank capital requirements by increasing bank liquidity and decreasing bank leverage.
The bank said that although a 2012 financial sector assessment program (FSAP) revealed that there were no significant risks to the financial system, domestic regulators acknowledged the need to prepare a comprehensive crisis management framework to address any adverse developments in the sector.
"In this regard, the major regulators continued to collaborate on a National Financial Crisis Management Plan and also received assistance from the IMF in the form of a technical assistance mission on crisis resolution powers, including the creation of a roadmap for establishing a legal and regulatory framework for bank resolution."
"In 2014, further progress is expected to be made in a number of these initiatives, which are designed to improve the ability of regulators to identify potential risks to the system. This includes the bank's plans to enhance its stress testing framework by using other plausible scenarios, as well as work towards the prospective introduction of a credit reporting framework, which will assist lending institutions in determining the credit risk of individual clients."
The bank's reports are contained in its Financial Stability Report December 2013, published on September 12, 2014.

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