Eleventh International Conference of Banking Supervisors

Press release  | 
21 September 2000

On 20 and 21 September 2000, representatives of about 160 banking supervisory authorities from more than 125 countries met in Basel for the eleventh International Conference of Banking Supervisors (ICBS) at the invitation of the Swiss National Bank, the Swiss Federal Banking Commission and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The conference was organised jointly by the Swiss authorities and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

The conference sessions were chaired by Mr William J McDonough, Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve of New York, and Dr Kurt Hauri, President of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission. Keynote speeches were delivered by Mr McDonough and by Mr Andrew Crockett, General Manager of the BIS and Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum. At the close of the conference, the William Taylor Memorial Lecture was delivered by Mr Lee Hsien Loong, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore and Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The Swiss Minister of Finance, Mr Kaspar Villiger, addressed participants at the closing dinner.

The international conferences, held at two-yearly intervals since 1979, are designed to promote cooperation among national authorities in the supervision of international banking and to enable senior representatives of supervisory authorities from a large number of countries to exchange views on a range of current issues of common concern. The two main themes of the conference on this occasion were the Review of the Basel Capital Accord and The Financial Industry in the 21st Century and the Consequences for Bank Supervision. Panel sessions and workshops on these subjects were chaired by Mr Claes Norgren, Chairman of the Basel Committee Task Force on the Future of Capital and Director General of Finansinspektionen (Sweden), and Prof Dr Bruno Gehrig, Member of the Board, Swiss National Bank, respectively. In addition, two special panel sessions took place on Banking's role in the development of emerging markets, chaired by Mr John Heimann, Chairman of the Financial Stability Institute, and on Core Principles Implementation, chaired by Mr Göran Lind, Adviser to the Members of the Executive Board, Bank of Sweden.

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The next ICBS is to take place in 2002 in Cape Town, South Africa, at the invitation of the South African Reserve Bank. Attached is the full programme for the eleventh International Conference of Banking Supervisors with hyperlinks indicating available text.