Bank for International Settlements

Bank for International Settlements
Founded	1930
Headquarters	Basel, Switzerland
Products	International organization that fosters the cooperation of central banks and international financial institutions
Twitter	@BIS_org
LinkedIn	Profile
Web site	www.bis.org

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is an international organization fostering the cooperation of central banks and international financial institutions. Established in 1930, it is owned by 63 central banks representing countries that together account for about 95 percent of world GDP. It is the world's oldest international financial organization. It is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and has two representative offices: one in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China and one in Mexico City. It serves as a central bank for other central banks.

It currently employs about 600 staff members from more than 60 countries, most of whom work at the Basel, Switzerland office.

The BIS in May of 2017 released the final version of its code of conduct for the global foreign-exchange market. The code was designed to improve transparency and fairness in ethics, governance, execution, information sharing, compliance and trade settlement in FX trading in response to investigations into fraud committed by FX traders at a number of major banks.

People

• François Villeroy de Galhau, Paris, Chairman of the Board
• Agustín Carstens, General Manager
• Andréa M Maechler, Deputy General Manager and Acting Head of BIS Innovation Hub
• Véronique Sani, Secretary General and Head of General Secretariat

History

The BIS was adopted on 20 January 1930 at the Hague Conference. It was created in the context of the Young Plan, which was intended to settle the question of reparation payments imposed on Germany (and to a lesser extent on other central European countries) by the Treaty of Versailles following World War I. The BIS was set up to take over the functions previously performed by the Agent General for Reparations: managing the collection, administration and distribution of the annuities payable as reparations.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the reparations issue faded and the German financial and banking crisis of 1931 led first to a one-year moratorium on reparation payments and then to their cancellation. The BIS focused its activities instead on the technical cooperation between central banks and on providing a forum for regular meetings of central bank governors and officials. The BIS developed its own research in central banking and finance under the guidance of its first economic adviser, Per Jacobsson, a Swede, and started collecting financial and banking statistics.

BIS Mandates

• A forum to promote discussion and policy analysis among central banks and within the international financial community
• A center for economic and monetary research
• A prime counterparty for central banks in their financial transactions
• An agent or trustee in connection with international financial operations

BIS Statistics

Given its connection between central banks and financial institutions globally, BIS statistics provide a thorough overview - and drilldown - into a number of areas of particular interest to financial institutions globally. These include data on:

• Cross-border lending and borrowing of internationally active banks in key financial centers, including offshore centers (banking statistics) Locational banking statistics

• Issuing activity in international and domestic securities markets (securities statistics) Securities statistics and syndicated loans

• Operations in over-the-counter (OTC) and exchange-traded derivatives markets (derivatives statistics)Semiannual OTC derivatives statistics

• Effective exchange rate (EER) indices for 52 economies (effective exchange rates) BIS Effective Exchange Rate indices

• Operations in the global foreign exchange markets (foreign exchange statistics) Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity in 2010 – Final results

• External debt positions of individual countries based on BIS banking and securities statistics, as well as on data from other international organizations (external debt statistics) Joint BIS-IMF-OECD-World Bank statistics on external debt

• Payment and settlement systems in major financial centers (payment statistics) Payment Systems

• The International Association of Insurance Supervisors, which operates from the BIS, publishes data on the global reinsurance market.

Central Bank Web Sites

Not surprisingly, BIS lists Web sites for all Central Banks.

Cryptocurrency

BIS surveys central banks' interest in cryptocurrencies. In January 2019, BIS reported its most recent survey's results. 63 central banks took part, 70% of which reported being engaged in, or about to being engaged in, central bank digital currencies (CBDC). In BIS's January 2020 reported results covered 66 central banks, 80% of which are engaged in CBDC activities. 40% of the respondents are engaged in experiments or proofs of concept and another 10% of them had launched pilot projects.

In its 2019 annual report, BIS said that big tech companies like Amazon and Google had begun seeking to offer payment services or other financial services to customers more than ever before. The report said that the technology used by these companies had the potential to improve global financial inclusivity by reducing costs associated with existing financial services, thereby lowering the barrier of entry for financial services for unbanked or underbanked people. It mentioned the development of Facebook's stablecoin Libra a number of times. In the report, BIS described the potential for big tech companies offering payment systems, such as Libra, to undermine banks, and highlighted the significant regulatory issues that would need to addressed, such as privacy issues, the tendency for big tech companies to lack the consumer protection expertise of existing financial institutions, and the fact that these services, though they technically compete with banks, still depend on banks to function.

In a press release dated January 21, 2020, BIS announced that it was joining the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Swedish Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank to share assessments of and experiences with potential uses for central bank digital currencies in their home jurisdictions. The group will address functional and technical design alternatives as well as interoperability. The group is co-chaired by Benoit Coeure, head of BIS's Innovation Hub, and Jon Cunliffe, deputy governor of the Bank of England and chair of the international Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure.

In August 2020, BIS partnered with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to hold a tech competition for the digitization of finance, with a particular emphasis on distributed ledger technology.

In March 2022, BIS and several central banks developed prototypes for a common digital currencies platform with the potential to make cross-border payments more efficient. Codenamed “Project Dunbar,” the development enables financial institutions to use central bank digital currencies to transact directly with one another on a shared platform. The central banks involved are the Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank Negara Malaysia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the South African Reserve Bank.

In June of 2025, the BIS issued its strongest warning yet on the risks posed by stablecoins, urging countries to move quickly towards the tokenisation of their currencies. Among the BIS' concerns were the potential for stablecoins to undermine monetary sovereignty, transparency issues and the risk of capital flight from emerging economies. The warning came less than a week after the U.S. Senate passed a bill to create a regulatory framework for U.S.-dollar-pegged stablecoins. The BIS wants central banks to use a tokenized "unified ledger" incorporating central bank reserves, commercial bank deposits and government bonds.