The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have published an easy read guide on everyday banking, aimed at helping autistic consumers better understand financial services. FCA have developed this guide in partnership with The National Autistic Society (NAS). FCA will publishing the guide during World Autism Awareness Week, in an effort to raise awareness of the issues some autistic people face when accessing financial services.
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In January 2016, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published the standard Minimum capital requirements for market risk. This new market risk standard was developed to address a number of structural shortcomings in the Basel II market risk framework (and its subsequent revisions), and served as a key component of the Basel Committee’s reform of global regulatory standards in response to the global financial crisis. In the time since its publication, the Basel Committee has monitored the pace of implementation of the market risk standard as well as its impact on banks’ market risk capital requirements. In acknowledgment of ongoing challenges related to implementation of the standard, the Basel Committee’s oversight body, the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision (GHOS), has endorsed an extension of the implementation date to 1 January 2022 (which will constitute both the implementation and regulatory reporting date for the standard). This deferred implementation date is intended to allow banks additional time to develop the systems infrastructure needed to apply the standard and for the Committee to address certain specific outstanding issues.

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In here speeech during the Asian Banker Digital Finance Convention 2018, Ms Jessica Chew Cheng Lian, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, talks about the role of digital leadership, ensuring the quality of growth in the financial sector, future-proofing the workforce and preparing the society for digital finance.
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The Bank for International Settlement (BIS) explores the role of interest rates in monetary policy transmission in China in the context of its multiple instrument setting. In doing so, BIS construct a new series of monetary policy surprises using information from high frequency Chinese financial market data around major monetary policy announcements. Their event analysis shows that monetary policy surprises have persistent effects on interest rates. Then they use these surprise measures as external instruments to identify monetary policy shocks in an SVAR. BIS finds that a contractionary monetary policy surprise increases interest rates and significantly reduces inflation and economic activity. Our findings provide further support to recent studies suggesting that monetary policy transmission in China has become increasingly similar to that in advanced economies.

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BIS investigates the role of firms’ credit risk in the onshore transmission of international bond market conditions. They show that reductions in the global price of risk, measured by the excess bond premium, encourage more international bond borrowing by smaller and younger firms. Due to informational asymmetries, these firms pay a higher credit spread. Thus their funding costs, and consequently their international borrowing, are more tightly linked to the global price of risk.

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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published Frameworks for early supervisory intervention, which presents a range-of-practice study on how supervisors around the world have adopted frameworks, processes, and tools to support early supervisory intervention. Since the global financial crisis, supervisory authorities have increasingly focused their attention on how early supervisory intervention can promote financial stability by reducing the probability and impact of a bank failure. There is also a common recognition that for supervision to operate effectively, identification and intervention at an early stage are critical to prevent problems from escalating or becoming acute.
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The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation to propose extending the scope of application of the existing Joint Committee (JC) Guidelines on complaints-handling to the new institutions established under the revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2) and the Mortgage Credit Directive (MCD). The proposal, which does not envisage any changes to the substance of the existing Guidelines, will ensure that an identical set of requirements for complaints-handling continues to apply to all financial institutions across the banking, investment and insurance sectors. The extension of the scope will provide consumers with the same level of protection, irrespective of which regulated product or service they are purchasing and which regulated institution they are purchasing it from. The consultation runs until 27 May 2018.
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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published new rules on pension transfer advice and is seeking views on additional changes, including adviser charging structures. The new rules and areas for discussion aim to improve the quality of pension transfer advice to help consumers make informed decisions for their individual circumstances.

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The SFO is set to recover millions lost in a corruption case which saw Griffiths Energy bribe Chadian diplomats in the United States and Canada. Securing exclusive contracts with corrupt deals, Griffiths Energy bribed Chadian diplomats with discounted shares deals and ‘consultancy fees’ using a front company ‘Chad Oil’ – which was set up just five days before agreements were signed. ‘Chad Oil’ was a vehicle used by senior diplomats at the Chadian Embassy to the United States to facilitate a deal which saw the wife of the former Deputy Chief, Mrs Ikram Saleh purchase 800,000 shares at less than 0.001$CAD each, later selling them for significant profit.
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