Weekend Reading: Moving the Dial — Fostering a Culture of Supervisory Effectiveness

This speech, originally published by the Forum on Financial Supervision, was presented at a closed-door meeting on supervisory effectiveness organized by the Financial Stability Institute and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in Basel on September 24, 2025.¹

I am very glad that the issue of supervisory effectiveness is taking centre stage in discussions within the international supervisory community. I would like to praise the team at the IMF for having raised the issue already back in 2010² and then again immediately after the spring 2023 turmoil,³ building on the experience of the Financial Sector Assessment Programs (FSAP). I consider it particularly important that the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) recently decided to work on this topic, publishing a very informative review of economic literature and conducting an important stocktake of good practices. The recent FSI paper on qualitative measures⁴ is also providing an essential reference in this debate. I was always struck by the dissonance between the heavy criticism aimed at supervisors after banking crises and the almost exclusive focus of the successive policy debates on regulatory repair, with little or no attention paid to supervisory processes and practices.