"Today's endorsement of the Basel III reforms represents a major milestone that will make the capital framework more robust and improve confidence in banking systems," said Mario Draghi, Chairman of the GHOS and President of the ECB. Mr Draghi added: "The package of reforms endorsed by the GHOS now completes the global reform of the regulatory framework, which began following the onset of the financial crisis."

Stefan Ingves, Chairman of the Basel Committee and Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, said: "These reforms will help reduce excessive variability in risk-weighted assets and will improve the comparability and transparency of banks' riskbased capital ratios. Now that the Basel III regulatory reform agenda is complete, we must focus on the important task of ensuring the standards are implemented consistently around the world. The Committee, through its Regulatory Consistency Assessment Programme, will therefore continue to monitor closely the implementation of the Basel III standards."

El jueves pasado se alcanzó un acuerdo para finalizar la regulación de Basilea III a los bancos. Hay que dar la bienvenida al acuerdo que permitirá reducir la incertidumbre posibilitando que bancos, inversores y analistas puedan tener más certeza sobre las necesidades de capital. Es relevante con todo que su implementación sea cuidadosa evitando potenciales riesgos sobre la financiación en algunos segmentos del crédito. La prioridad de los bancos es financiar el crecimiento y generar prosperidad. Es importante que la regulación estricta actual no suponga un obstáculo para que las entidades de crédito cumplan con su principal cometido. The reforms endorsed by the GHOS include the following elements:

• 1. a revised standardised approach for credit risk, which will improve the robustness and risk sensitivity of the existing approach;

• 2. revisions to the internal ratings-based approach for credit risk, where the use of the most advanced internally modelled approaches for low-default portfolios will be limited;

• 3. revisions to the credit valuation adjustment (CVA) framework, including the removal of the internally modelled approach and the introduction of a revised standardised approach;

• 4. a revised standardised approach for operational risk, which will replace the existing standardised approaches and the advanced measurement approaches;

• 5. revisions to the measurement of the leverage ratio and a leverage ratio buffer for global systemically important banks (G-SIBs), which will take the form of a Tier 1 capital buffer set at 50% of a G-SIB's risk-weighted capital buffer; and

• 6. an aggregate output floor, which will ensure that banks' risk-weighted assets (RWAs) generated by internal models are no lower than 72.5% of RWAs as calculated by the Basel III framework's standardised approaches. Banks will also be required to disclose their RWAs based on these standardised approaches.