Financial regulation and supervision: Theory and practice in South Africa.

Abstract

This paper discusses the theory of financial regulation and practices in countries and South Africa in particular. One of the causes of the global financial crisis (2007-2009) often cited is inadequate or improper regulation and supervision of the financial sector. The global financial crisis revealed inadequacies of extant regulatory systems which arguably had not kept pace with financial innovation. Consequently, all major economies are reforming their regulatory systems in the aftermath. In the UK the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has devised a set of banking regulation while the USA enacted the Dodd-Frank Act to revamp the regulation of financial services. Historically, financial regulation and supervision has been premised on the silo (institutional) approach whereby institutions are regulated according to functional lines. However, in the past two decades many countries in advanced economies adopted a consolidated approach in response to the emergence of financial conglomerates whose regulation could not be adequately handled by the traditional silo approach. South Africa, a middle-income developing country, has had a regulatory and supervisory system that has been driven by the market and international trends. Having started as a institutional approach, it metamorphosed into a functional approach in the late 1980s. Since the 1990s the South African regulatory and supervisory system has had at its heart the central bank regulating the banking sector and a multi-sector regulatory approach for other non-banking financial services. Though the financial sector was largely unscathed by the global financial crisis, South Africa has also moved to reform its regulatory system to embrace the “twin peak” model in line with trends in related countries.