Awareness Programme

The AMF-IFSB-IMF organised a Conference on Soundness Indicators for Conventional and Islamic Finance on 1 – 2 March 2017 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The Conference aimed to serve as a platform to bring together mid-to-senior level officials from the central banks and other regulatory and supervisory authorities (RSAs) in member jurisdictions of the IMF, IFSB, and AMF to discuss how the existing indicators for both conventional and Islamic financial systems can support financial stability through macroprudential policies, and to garnered feedback from the authorities on their experiences and challenges in the compilation of these indicators. The conference was also intended to broaden countries’ interest in compiling soundness indicators, encouraging non-reporting jurisdictions to participate and benefit from these projects. Almost 60 delegates from among the supervisory authorities and international organisations, academic institutions as well as financial market players attended this conference. Event Snapshots Programme - Event Session(s) Date Time Topics Day 1 01/03/2017 08:30 - 09:00 Registration 09:00 - 09:40 Opening and Welcoming Remarks 09:40 - 09:50 Keynote Address 09:50 - 10:15 Coffee Break & Networking 10:15 - 11:30 Session 1: IMF's Financial Soundness Indicators and Surveillance The session will focus on the IMF's Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs), the ongoing work on the development, compilation, and use of FSIs, including various analytical frameworks for macroprudential and other analysis using FSIs. 11:30 - 13:00 Session 2: Soundness Indicators for the Islamic Financial Services Industry The session will focus on statistical needs of the Islamic financial services industry (IFSI). Data limitations have been a significant issue for the IFSI, which has hindered the accurate surveillance and assessment of its growth and stability. The IFSB's PSIFIs database project, which was developed in light of these needs, has achieved several key milestones, with further work planned ahead to build a comprehensive and consistent framework and infrastructure for Islamic Financial Statistics. 13:00 - 14:30 Lunch 14:30 - 16:00 Session 3: Interactive Session : Countries Experiences and Challenges in Compiling FSIs and PSIFIs The session will foster discussion and garner feedback from RSAs on their experiences, expectations as well as challenges in the compilation of quality and relevant data for soundness indicators. The session will address the following: What are the challenges in the compilation of FSIs and PSIFIs What are the areas where further progress is needed How does the Soundness Indicators contribute to surveillance and macro prudential and macroeconomic policy making 16:00 - 16:30 Networking and Side Meetings Day 2 02/03/2017 09:00 - 10:15 Session 4: Use of FSIs and PSIFIs The session will look at how the impact of macro-economic shocks can be assessed by utilising the FSIs and PSIFIs, which are sectoral indicators of financial health, in macro stress testing frameworks of RSAs. Analytical work has focused on how aggregate stress testing can be used in combination with FSIs and PSIFIs - which are typically the outputs or intermediate inputs of stress tests - to enhance their usefulness. 10:15 - 10:45 Coffee Break & Networking 10:45 - 12:15 Session 5: Concentration and Distribution Measures The session will discuss the need for augmenting the FSIs and possibly PSIFIs with relevant concentration and distribution measures (CDMs) to capture tail risks, concentrations, variations in distributions, and the volatility of indicators over time that simple averages can miss. As a starting point, the IMF pilot project launched in July 2014 by the Statistics Department to test the CDMs will be presented. 12:15 - 13:45 Lunch 13:45 - 15:15 Session 6: Panel Discussion Global Soundness Indicators: Future Direction The panel discussion will focus on what is next on the agenda for global soundness indicators, including: Areas for further expansion of data coverage, particularly in terms of addressing priority areas and data gaps; Enhancing the current indicators and compilation methodologies, Future role of soundness indicators in surveillance, core principle assessment and stress testing; Areas for collaboration between multilateral organisations to improve the quality and consistency of financial statistics, including strategies to meet the capacity-building needs to strengthen the institutional and statistical capacity for better understanding, compilation and use of the indicators. 15:15 - 15:30 Closing Remarks 15:30 - 16:00 Networking and Side Meetings