The Basel Committee and the Basel Accords — conclusion

Conclusion

The Basel Committee began in 1974 as a modest forum for the exchange of information among supervisors who had seen how the failure of a Cologne bank could disrupt payments in New York. Over five decades, it has become the global standard setter for banking regulation. It closed supervisory gaps through the Concordat, introduced a common capital standard in 1988, shifted to risk-sensitive models in 1996 and 2004 and, after the crisis of 2007 to 2009, rebuilt the framework around the quality of capital, buffers, leverage and liquidity. The finalisation of 2017 sought to restore confidence in risk weights through the output floor. Its uneven implementation in the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States shows the limits of a regime that rests on soft law, consensus and peer review, while the work on crypto-assets and digital assets and on climate risk shows that the Committee's agenda continues to widen.

For Switzerland, these standards have concrete consequences. The country has implemented the final Basel III package in full and has added requirements of its own for its systemically important banks, at a time when the collapse of Credit Suisse has called the adequacy of the existing rules into question. The next chapter turns to that Swiss implementation and to the debate about capital and supervision that followed the events of March 2023.

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.