摘要:Financial conglomerates, combining banking, securities trading, and insurance, have become an
important part of the financial landscape in many countries. Cross-sector consolidation has been
fostered by trends such as disintermediation, globalization, and deregulation creating new challenges
for both the group¡¯s management as well as for regulators. We discuss the theoretical reasons why
supervisors are interested in the riskiness of a financial firm and why ¨C for firms ¨C a similar concern
emerges from the theory on risk management, both from a market and a firm perspective. After
describing the Dutch institutional set-up, we turn to the discussion of the following question: How can
a supervisor devise a framework of supervision that does justice to a financial conglomerate¡¯s own
responsibility and, at the same time, safeguards the general public¡¯s interest? The framework, we feel,
should be similar in flavor to the Supervisory Review, as proposed in the new Basel accord.