|
The Financial Institutions Department has
three major roles.
Firstly, it is responsible for making
recommendations on the licensing of new banks and the ongoing prudential
supervision of all the commercial banks in Samoa. To do this, it gathers
considerable amounts of information about the operations of the banks,
visits the banks to review their operations and analyses the data it has
gathered.
The analysis can provide significant
clues about the financial status of the bank. For example, standard
ratios are calculated to see how they match up against legal
requirements and how they are changing over time. Particular problems
can be reviews to see if improvements in the situation are appearing.
In this way, the Department is able to
judge whether a bank is performing well or poorly, and can, if
necessary, require alterations to its current operating procedures. The
end purpose is to ensure that poor deposited with banks by their
customers.
However, the Central Bank does not
guarantee that depositors will always get their money back.
The Bank also undertakes broad oversight
of non-bank financial institutions in the interests of financial
stability.
Part of the job is to ensure that the
Department's own procedures are up to international standards and much
time is spent reviewing how this work is done overseas in an effort to
make sure that the Bank is doing its work as well as it can.
The second role for the Department is to
make sure that the financial system is operating efficiently. As
financial transactions are a significant part of the lives of both
individuals and businesses, an inefficient financial system can waste a
lot of time and money. Ensuring that the payments system, both domestic
and international, is working properly and that there are enough
competitors in the various financial markets is important to development
of the country.
An essential aspect of this job is the
publication of the various fees and charges of the commercial banks, to
allow members of the public to compare the costs of the services of the
banks.
It is not part of the Central Bank's
duties to look at the complaints of individual bank customers, but
should the general practices of the banks cause problems, the Bank will
discuss the issue with the bank concerned.
Finally, we pointed out earlier that the
Central Bank is now Samoa's Money Laundering Authority.
The Financial Institutions Department
handles this task, collecting and analyzing information in an effort to
detect any funds that may have been obtained by illegal activities. |
