APRA’s ADI capital regime – Unfinished business

Corporate Plans can be pretty dry reading but I had a quick skim of what is on APRA’s agenda for the next four years. The need to deal with consequences of COVID 19 obviously remains front and centre but APRA has reiterated its commitment to pursue the objectives laid out in its previous corporate plan.

Looking outward (what APRA refers to as “community outcomes”) there are four unchanged objectives

• maintaining financial system resilience;
• improving outcomes for superannuation members;
• transforming governance, culture, remuneration and accountability across all regulated institutions; and
• improving cyber resilience across the financial system.

Looking inward, APRA’s priorities are:

• improving and broadening risk-based supervision;
• improving resolution capacity;
• improving external engagement and collaboration;
• transforming data-enabled decision-making; and
• transforming leadership, culture and ways of working.

What is interesting – from a bank capital management perspective

What I found interesting was a reference in APRA’s four year roadmap for strategy execution to a commitment to “Finalisation of ADI capital regime” (page 26). The schematic provides virtually no detail other than a “Milestone” to be achieved by December 2020 and for the project to be completed sometime in 2022/23.

Based on the outline in the strategic roadmap, my guess is that we will see a consultation paper on capital adequacy released later this year. I don’t have any real insights on exactly what APRA has in mind but a discussion paper APRA released in August 2018 titled “Improving the transparency, comparability and flexibility of the ADI capital framework” may offer some clues.

The DP outlines

“… options to modify the ADI capital framework to improve transparency and comparability of reported capital ratios. The main conceptual approaches APRA is considering and seeking feedback on are:

• developing more consistent disclosures without modifying the underlying capital framework; and
• modifying the capital framework by adjusting the methodology for calculating capital ratios.”

The First Approach– “Consistent disclosure” – seems to be a beefed up version of the status quo in which APRA gets more directly involved in the comparability process by adding its imprimatur to the internationally harmonised ratios some Australian banks currently choose to disclose as an additional informal measure of capital strength.

“Under this approach, ADIs would continue to determine regulatory capital ratios using APRA’s definitions of capital and RWA. However, APRA would also specify a methodology for ADIs to determine certain adjustments to capital and RWA that could be used for disclosure (Pillar 3) purposes. As noted above, the methodology would focus on aspects of relative conservatism that are material in size and able to be calculated simply and objectively.”

APRA argues that “The supplementary disclosure would allow all stakeholders to better assess the capital strength of an ADI on a more comparable basis. However, it would result in two APRA-endorsed capital ratios: an APRA regulatory capital ratio to be compared against minimum requirements, and an additional disclosure-only capital ratio for, in particular, international comparison.”

A Second Approach – “Capital ratio adjustments” would involve APRA modifying the calculation of regulatory capital ratios to utilise more internationally harmonised definitions of capital and RWA.

The DP explains that this “… alternative approach would involve APRA modifying the calculation of regulatory capital ratios to utilise more internationally harmonised definitions of capital and RWA. This would involve removing certain aspects of relative conservatism from ADIs’ capital ratio calculations and lifting minimum regulatory capital ratio requirements in tandem. This increase in regulatory capital ratio requirements could be in the form of a transparent adjustment to minimum capital ratio requirements—for the purposes of this paper, such an adjustment is termed the ‘APRA Overlay Adjustment’.”

“To maintain overall capital adequacy, the APRA Overlay Adjustment would need to be calculated such that the total dollar amount of Prudential Capital Requirement (PCR) and Capital Conservation Buffer (CCB) would be the same as that required if these measures were not adopted. In other words, the risk-based capital requirements of ADIs would be unchanged in absolute dollar terms, maintaining financial safety, but adjustments to the numerator and the denominator of the capital ratio to be more internationally comparable would increase reported capital ratios.”

APRA clarify that

“These options are not mutually exclusive, and there is potential for both approaches to be adopted and applied in different areas.”

I offered my views on these options here.

Tony – From the Outside