32  FATF (2021), “Updated Guidance for a Risk-Based Approach Virtual Assets and Virtual Asset Service Providers”. 33  https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/210720-anti-money-laundering-countering-financing-terrorism_en. 10  In this respect, matters such as restricting said activities to supervised deposit institutions,34 constraining reference assets to higher quality ones and imposing transparency measures on the latter35 are emerging issues that could ultimately become global trends. At the national level, in Spain there are no specific regulations on crypto-assets. The Spanish National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) has issued a circular on advertising of crypto-assets intended for financial investment36. The circular aims to ensure that the advertising content is accurate, easily understandable and not misleading, and that it clearly includes mention of the associated risks, including the possible loss of the entire investment. As such, this regulation establishes the tools and procedures for effective supervision of crypto-asset advertising, but it does not regulate either crypto-assets, their issuance or crypto-asset-related services And, since October 2021, the Banco de España37 has held a special register of providers, although its scope is currently restricted to only a subset of players.38 Unlike other registers, this one has a limited purpose, catering only for anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing needs. In other words, an entity’s inclusion in the register does not imply that it has been granted prudential authorisation, i.e. it does not guarantee that the agent is solvent or has the technical capabilities necessary to correctly pursue its activity. Nor does the register impose specific transparency requirements vis-à-vis the agent’s clients.

Evaluating banks’ readiness  First, the member countries of the Basel Committee have begun to survey their banks’ preparation for the New Accord. Some are gathering information on how banks plan to benefit from the new framework, while others have already evaluated selected banks’ internal rating systems and databases to understand how close those banks may be to meeting the stringent requirements associated with the more advanced approaches. In all cases, we are working to understand the challenges that banks will face and are seeking ways to smooth the transition to the new framework. BIS Review 52/2002  5  2. Training and preparing supervisory staff  Likewise, supervisors in all of the Basel Committee’s member countries are laboring to make sure that they, too, will be ready for the new rules, which is a second area of focus. From the supervisor’s perspective, the New Basel Accord will require a heightened sense of the internal processes used to identify and quantify risk. This, in my mind, focuses our energy on exactly the right place – that is, how we can encourage improvements in risk management by critically evaluating current practices. Our supervisory assessments will encompass several relatively new elements – importantly, validating the integrity, accuracy and consistency of the bank’s process for assigning internal credit ratings. Since those ratings will feed directly into models used to manage credit risk, we will scrutinize more than ever their accuracy and integrity. If the initial inputs are wrong, the whole capital allocation system becomes faulty.