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Regulators' reviews of big banks' internal resolution plans will become more rigorous in 2014 as a debate grows over what parts of the plans can be seen by the public.
January 10 -
U.S. regulators on Tuesday gave certain firms, including large foreign institutions with a small footprint in the U.S., a guide on how to tailor their resolution plans that must be submitted by yearend.
September 3 -
Companies that submitted initial resolution plans last year to the Fed and FDIC under Dodd-Frank must detail in their second drafts how they would address impediments to a wind-down and follow the series of steps required for bankruptcy.
April 15
WASHINGTON Regulators posted condensed blueprints Friday from 116 banking firms on how they could be unwound in a failure.
The release by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve Board closes an early chapter of the "living will" process. The regulators had divided firms filing resolution plans into three groups for submitting their first drafts. The most complex companies delivered drafts in mid-2012, followed by a second batch in July 2013. Following each filing, the agencies released summary versions to the public.
The regulators issued the summaries Friday of the plans submitted at yearend by the least complex firms required under the Dodd-Frank Act to chart their demise.
These so-called "third wave" of filers, which must fall below a $100 billion cutoff for non-banking assets, include staples of the U.S. banking system such as Fifth Third and SunTrust. But the group also includes a whole host of lesser-known foreign banks that while exceeding $50 billion in total global assets often just operate one branch in the U.S. Names such as Ziraat Bank in Turkey and Riyad Bank in Saudi Arabia are on the list.
The two agencies had sought to simplify the process for the third tier of filers, releasing a template in September for "tailored" resolution plans. The public summaries for the foreign-based institutions focus largely just on their U.S. operations.
The public sections of all the living wills filed since July 2012 include information about a firm's financial holdings and legal entities, as well as a basic summary of the firm's resolution strategy. They are said to be considerably shorter and less detailed than the plans seen by the regulators, but some former regulators and other experts have called for greater transparency in the publicly released versions.
Meanwhile, the biggest and most complex firms subject to living will requirements 11 companies included in the "first wave" have already moved on to the next phase in the process. Their second drafts were filed in October, and are currently being reviewed by the agencies for whether they meet a more rigorous standard for resolvability.
