Regulators are increasingly mistrustful of banks using internal models to calculate their capital requirements, but the alternatives are not trouble-free.

Accelerating the EU's fourth anti-money laundering directive will place additional burden on compliance professionals, but the rewards are clear given the need to combat the threat of terrorism, writes Kieran Beer of the Association for Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists.

The annual Microscope global report on financial inclusion provides a kind of open-source regulation for fostering the right environment to give everyone access to banking and credit services, wherever they are, writes Michael Schlein, president and chief executive of Accion. 

Regulatory constraints on bank balance sheets may result in reduced market liquidity, but regulators are willing to pay that price to build more resilient financial institutions.

The search for industry standards focuses minds on fostering an open and innovative environment where good conduct and good performance co-exist.

The UK's Senior Managers Regime seeks to formalise responsibility for risk, yet the threat of cyber attack sits outside of traditional risk governance standards, and means that protecting against such attacks will require a rethink of the traditional 'three lines of defence' model.

With post-crisis recapitalisations hopefully in the past, stress-testing has become a means to push banks to enhance their risk and data governance.

Strengthening EU equity and venture capital markets is a valuable idea, but its success will still depend on a change in investor attitudes and a reduction of sovereign risks.

Structural reforms have consumed an immense amount of time and effort from regulators and industry participants in the past few years, but will they be made obsolete by more general changes to the global banking market?