The official site of Italy's central bank

Senior Supervisors Group

The Senior Supervisors Group (SSG) currently includes senior supervisory authorities of major financial services firms from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States (The Canadian Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, the French Prudential Control Authority, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, the Bank of Italy, the Japanese Financial Services Agency, the Netherlands Bank, the Bank of Spain, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, the U.K. Financial Services Authority, and, in the United States, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve).

On December 23, 2010, the SSG issued a report that evaluates how financial institutions have progressed in developing formal risk appetite frameworks and in building out highly developed IT infrastructures and firmwide data aggregation capabilities.

The report — Observations on Developments in Risk Appetite Frameworks and IT Infrastructures — concludes that while firms have made progress in developing risk appetite frameworks and have begun multiyear projects to improve IT infrastructure, considerably more work must be done to strengthen these practices. In particular, the aggregation of risk data remains a challenge, despite its criticality to strategic planning, decision making, and risk management.

The observations and conclusions in the report reflect the findings of initiatives undertaken by two SSG working groups. The risk appetite working group conducted a series of interviews with boards of directors and senior management of global financial institutions to gauge progress in risk appetite frameworks, while the working group that focused on IT infrastructure based its views on observations from a number of existing supervisory efforts.

These initiatives were conducted to support the priorities of the Financial Stability Board, whose mission is to address vulnerabilities in the financial system and to promote global financial stability.

Previous SSG’ reports. The SSG released on March 6, 2008 its first report, Observations on Risk Management Practices during the Recent Market Turbulence. On October 21, 2009, the SSG released a follow-up report, Risk Management Lessons from the Global Banking Crisis of 2008 (the “2009 SSG report).