SBI, ICICI Bank systemically important: RBI

5 Dariya News

Chennai 31-Aug-2015

India's largest bank State Bank of India (SBI) and the largest private sector bank ICICI Bank have been designated as domestic systemically important banks (D-SIB), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said on Monday.In a statement, RBI said SBI and ICICI Bank have been designated as D-SIB under its Framework for dealing with D-SIB issued last July."The D-SIB framework requires the Reserve Bank to disclose the names of banks designated as D-SIBs every year in August starting from August 2015," it said.As per the framework, D-SIBs may be placed in four buckets depending upon their systemic importance scores (SISs)."Based on the bucket in which a D-SIB is placed, an additional common equity requirement has to be applied to it, as mentioned in the D-SIB Framework," the statement said.As per the framework, D-SIBs are identified under a two step process. "In the first step, the sample of banks to be assessed for systemic importance has to be decided. The selection of banks in the sample for computation of SIS is based on analysis of their size as a percentage of annual GDP," RBI said.

As a result the additional common equity tier 1 requirement as a percentage of risk weighted assets for SBI is 0.6 percent and for ICICI Bank, it is 0.2 percent.This will be in addition to the capital conservation buffer.According to RBI, the addition common equity tier 1 is applicable for the two banks from April 1, 2016 in a phased manner.It would be fully effective from April 1, 2019 onwards.The RBI said that in case of a foreign bank having branch presence in India is a global systemically important bank (G-SIB), then it has to maintain additional common equity tier 1 capital surcharge as is applicable proportionate to its risk weighted assets in India.