Along with extraordinary measures taken to withstand the crisis effects in the short run, authorities of advanced economies and international financial institutions have been strongly committed to change the way of global financial system functioning and its regulating superstructure. Many financial market regulation and supervision standards are expected to change, aiming at putting necessary boundaries to financial market dynamism and innovations, in order to ensure system’s stability and its resilience to various risks. In more details, the goals of these changes will be: strengthen the mechanisms that raise financial system stability; duly orient the stimuli that determine decision-making in the financial activity and decrease procyclicality in it. Changes to the regulatory and supervisory superstructure are aimed at strengthening the institutional mechanism, paying greater attention to systemic risks and global-wide financial institutions. Better conditions will be set for supervisory standards convergence and the cooperation among regulatory authorities operating in different jurisdictions will be strengthened. At the same time, the role of international financial institutions will be oriented towards financial crisis management and their resources will be adapted to this end. 2  BIS Review 129/2009  For many reasons, which converge in ongoing processes of financial integration and economic globalization, no country can pretend to stand beyond these developments.

In this framework some issues that deserve special attention will be: a)  Setting parameters that ensure a better equilibrium between performance of risky assets of the banking sector and financing resources, as concerns type of currency, maturity term, interest rate;  b)  Setting volumes and certain features of banks’ operational assets that enable maintaining of satisfactory liquidity levels;  c)  Identifying certain mechanisms that will mitigate the cyclicality in banking activity, particularly in the context of rapid growth of banking activity or in cases of its significant contraction;  d)  Strengthening requirements for managing extraordinary situations and business continuation;  e)  Improving structures of management, accountability and performance appraisal and increasing expenditure effectiveness for training, financial stimulation and human resources strengthening;  f)  Further strengthening of the requirements for transparency to clients, and the regulatory framework for customer protection from likely abusive practices in the financial system. The Bank of Albania will be committed to this process, making use of all necessary human and financial resources, aiming at further improvement of legal, regulatory and operational procedures, so as to create steadier conditions for a balanced banking activity, which remains profitable and carries out the intermediation process in a competitive way over the long run. We are convinced that this reassessment process is necessary, not only to operate in the framework of convergence to international standards, which are changing, but also to act pre-emptively to financial and banking activity risks, which arise from its rapid development.