Panama - Financial Sector Assessment Program : Detailed Assessment of Observance - Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision (English)

The Basel Core Principles (BCP) assessment was conducted in Panama City, Panama, from January 17 to February 6, 2023. This assessment of the implementation of the BCPs by the Superintendency of Banks of Panama (SBP) is part of the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) undertaken by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The assessors had the full cooperation from the Panamanian authorities and received all information necessary for the assessment. The SBP’s primary objective should be to safeguard the soundness of the financial system, with the remaining three objectives subordinate to this objective. The remaining two objectives, namely promoting trust in the banking system and safeguarding the judicial balance between the banking system and its clients, do not conflict with the SBP’s safety and soundness objective. The SBP collects and analyzes a wide range of prudential reports from banks on both a solo and a consolidated basis, but does not collect data on banks’ consolidated liquidity positions, wider concentration risks that may be run by banks or banking groups bank, and interest rate risk in the banking book (IRRBB). The SBP has implemented a framework for credit concentration risk and large exposure limits, but the framework does not apply to all material sources of concentration risk.