Supervisory guidance for assessing banks' financial instrument fair value practices

The application of fair value accounting to a wider range of financial instruments, together with experiences from the recent market turmoil, have emphasised the critical importance of robust risk management and control processes around fair value measurements. Moreover, given the significance of fair value measurements for regulatory capital adequacy and internal bank risk management it is equally important that supervisors assess the soundness of banks' valuation practices through the Pillar 2 supervisory review process under the Basel II Framework.

The paper provides guidance to banks and banking supervisors to strengthen valuation processes for financial instruments. The principles promote strong governance processes around valuations; the use of reliable inputs and diverse information sources; the articulation and communication of valuation uncertainty to internal and external stakeholders; the allocation of sufficient banking and supervisory resources to the valuation process; independent verification and validation processes; consistency in valuation practices for risk management and reporting purposes, where possible; and strong supervisory oversight around bank valuation practices.

The final version of this paper was released in April 2009.