Assessing the Supervision of Other Financial Intermediaries
This chapter focuses on issues in the regulation of a range of non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs), categorized as Other Financial Intermediaries (OFIs). OFIs refer to those financial corporations that are primarily engaged in financial intermediation—that is, corporations that channel funds from lenders to borrowers through their own account or in auxiliary financial activities that are closely related to financial intermediation—but are not classified as deposit takers (IMF 2004a).1 OFIs include insurance corporations; pension funds; securities dealers; investment funds; finance, leasing, and factoring companies; and asset management companies. This chapter discusses considerations in assessing the regulation and supervision of OFIs (other than insurance companies and security market intermediaries) generally, with a focus on specialized finance institutions, leasing and factoring companies, and pension funds.
Although OFIs are often dwarfed by commercial banks in terms of volume of business and size of assets, OFIs should receive adequate attention during the assessment process for various reasons. OFIs play an important developmental role through their activity in areas and markets where the presence of commercial banks is not fully felt. Moreover, the development of OFIs could increase bank competition, which could lead to greater access to finance. In many countries, pension funds are major contractual savings institutions with a significant effect on financial markets and the macroeconomy.
Specialized financial institutions (such as thrifts, building societies, and mortgage institutions) have emerged in many countries to carry out real estate finance. However, in many countries, other than their specialization in housing finance, those institutions are
indistinguishable from deposit-taking institutions such as banks, and they require attention from both the stability and the development perspectives.
Leasing companies engage in relatively simple transactions where the lessee (a business owner) uses the asset (owned by the leasing company) for a fixed period of time, while making payments on a set schedule. At the end of the lease, the lessee buys the asset for a nominal fee, giving the lessee the opportunity to make a capital investment. Leasing companies can serve as a significant source of finance for small firms wanting to invest in equipment, and that investment in leasing companies can yield attractive returns if conditions are right.
Factoring companies are financial institutions that specialize in the business of accounts receivable management. Factoring is an important source of external financing for corporations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which receive credit based on the value of their accounts receivables. Under this form of asset-based finance, the credit provided by a lender is explicitly linked on a formula basis to the value of a borrower’s underlying assets (working capital), not to the borrower’s overall creditworthiness. In developing countries, factoring offers several advantages over other types of lending. First, factoring may be particularly useful in countries with weak secured-lending laws, inefficient bankruptcy systems, and imperfect records of upholding seniority claims, because factored receivables are not part of the estate of a bankrupt SME. Second, in a factoring relationship the credit is primarily based on quality of the underlying accounts, not on the quality of the borrower. Thus, factoring may be especially attractive to high-risk SMEs (Bakker, Klapper, and Udell 2004).
The development of OFIs such as leasing and factoring companies (especially if they were operated by groups that were independent of large banks and insurance companies) increases lending to smaller borrowers. Some practitioners argue that stand-alone OFIs tend to compete more vigorously. For that reason, the International Finance Corporation prefers to finance stand-alone leasing companies despite their disadvantage when competing with leasing subsidiaries of commercial banks, which can tap into low-cost depositors’ funding from their parent companies) (International Finance Corporation 1996).
While the small size of the OFI sector in some countries may limit OFI’s systemic effect on the rest of the financial sector in case of crisis, stress in OFIs could have systemic effects in specific circumstances. In particular, difficulties in OFIs may have some systemic effect, insofar as they trigger a loss of confidence in deposit-taking activities. For instance, a crisis of confidence can spread from one subsector of the financial system to another subsector, owing to perceived ownership or balance-sheet linkages. Moreover, the lack of effective regulations for OFIs can exacerbate the fragility of the overall financial system through regulatory arbitrage (Herring and Santomero 1999).
In many countries, pension funds are a major source of contractual savings, providing a stable source of long-term investment to support growth and at the same time playing a key role in financial markets through their investment behavior. National pension systems provide retirement income from a mixture of government, employment, and individual savings. Pension funds affect the stability of financial markets and the distribution of risks among different sectors of the economy by their investment behavior and the way they manage their risk.
