Effectiveness of Prudential Regulations for Banks: Global Perspective and Indian Context

Banking regulations aim to strengthen financial stability and promote policies that foster safety, consistency, reliability, fairness, and inclusion in the financial products and services offered by banks. The context of discussions in this book, spread over five carefully selected chapters, is the Indian financial system with a global perspective. It highlights the need for continual improvement in the effectiveness of regulatory and supervisory processes to achieve stability, transparency, and robustness in financial institutions and financial markets. The effectiveness of prudential regulations depends upon the institutional credibility, deterrents, and enforcement mechanism. Moreover, prudential regulations should maintain pace with the time and changing dynamics of the financial system. Putting in place clear, uncomplicated regulations, and shunning complexity in the regulatory and supervisory processes helps in achieving the intended outcomes. Besides, inadequate internal controls, false assumptions about markets and liquidity, and lack of due diligence processes in financial institutions contribute to their failures and hence, it is a regulatory challenge to incentivize the banks to join the regulators in pursuit of effective risk optimization, and achieving the common good of a stable, fair, and efficient financial system. Liquidity remains a crucial focus of prudential regulations and it is important to understand the behavioural biases such as overconfidence, linear extrapolation, confirmation bias, and group-think, which hamper effective liquidity risk management in regulated institutions. An increasingly expanding toolkit of the perpetrators of financial crimes as a latent malfunction of global integration of financial systems and the advent of digital transactions is another matter of concern for regulators requiring enhanced focus on the gatekeepers. Finally, the financial innovations and technological advancements in the world of alternative finance require an appropriate regulatory structure that facilitates an orderly growth of alternative finance within the traditional financial landscape. This book offers a crisp reading on these key areas and presents a nuanced approach to improve the effectiveness of the prudential regulations.