Canada forges ahead with regulatory approach

Canada is leading the charge with its new capital market frameworks.

With the rest of the world reviewing their capital market frameworks and implementing updates, Canadian regulators are pushing forward with their plan for a standardized approach.

“In Canada we’ve been on the forefront of this,” said Ritchie Hok, Senior Analyst, Life Capital Division with the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. “Our standardized approach has served us well up to this point but there’s always a need to keep it up to date with new and emerging techniques and a better understanding of the risks.”

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The tremendous uptake in technology has also spurred change on.

“Especially with increasing computing power we can run a lot more tests – increase the accuracy of the risk measurements using new techniques,” he said. “That’s something we might not have been able to do recently so it’s sort of like introducing a more refined, more of a sensitive framework.”

The plan is to implement the framework in 2018 by phasing it in. But there are still numerous steps before that’s done with companies currently working on a quantitative impact study, with one coming in the fall.

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In 2016 and 2017 companies will do parallel runs where they use both the current and new framework to get a sense of the impacts. It will also allow companies to build up their systems to be able to handle the new framework in a live environment.

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