BoE says regulators may lighten capital burden on derivatives

Global regulators will propose ways that could ease capital requirements for banks that clear large numbers of financial derivatives, a Bank of England official said on Tuesday. Banks have long campaigned for changes to a broad measure of capital to total assets, known as the leverage ratio, which becomes mandatory from 2018.
The rule as currently written requires banks to tot up their gross exposures to derivatives such as credit default swaps and interest rate swaps when calculating compliance with the new ratio.
Banks argue that chunks of the billions of euros in derivatives they trade on behalf of customers will have to be cleared in future, or pass through a third party to ensure a trade's completion.
During clearing, the customer must post a margin or cash to cover risks of losses. This, the banks say, should mean they can deduct the margin from their derivatives exposures to leave a net figure that would not have to be covered by so much capital.
Stephen Bland, a director and strategic adviser at the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, said the global Basel Committee, which wrote the leverage ratio rule, was working on the issue.
"The Bank of England has already said we should have a netted margin approach to the leverage ratio for clearing trades," Bland told an industry conference.
"Basel is going to come out very soon on a proposed way forward on that," Bland said.
The Basel Committee, which includes the BoE as a member, had no comment ahead of publication of the proposal in coming weeks.
The proposals are expected to explore possible changes to how banks calculate their exposures to derivatives.
Any softening of the rules would be the latest sign of regulators taking a more accommodative stance.
One way of acknowledging the collection of an initial margin could be to replace the "current exposure method" or CEM for calculating derivatives exposures, with the so-called standardised approach for measuring counterparty credit risk or SA-CCR, which the Basel Committee has already fleshed out.
But for the purposes of setting the leverage ratio, the full netting benefits allowed under SA-CCR could be reined in, given that the ratio is meant to be a broad measure of capital to risk at banks.