Canada’s big five banks will have to start making additional public disclosures about various measures of systemic importance under new rules aimed at enhancing public transparency about systemically important banks.
The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) published an advisory Monday, spelling out new disclosure requirements for big banks.
In July 2013, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision established a requirement for the annual public disclosure of selected data that it uses to assess whether an institution is to be considered systemically important, including measures of interconnectedness, complexity, and asset exposure.
The disclosure requirement applies to large globally active banks. OSFI’s advisory says that federally regulated banks that meet the definition as of the end of financial year 2013 are required to publicly disclose in the required data in their interim financial reports in the first quarter of 2015.
In Canada, all of the big five banks (Bank of Montreal, CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia, and Toronto-Dominion Bank) currently meet the criteria requiring disclosure, OSFI notes.
The advisory notes that banks may choose to disclose the required information in their annual reports to shareholders. “These banks are required to publicly disclose, at a minimum, the Canadian-dollar denominated values of the 12 indicators comprising the G-SIB assessment methodology,” it notes.