Thirty global financial institutions make up a list that regulators are earmarking for cross-border supervision exercises, the Financial Times has learnt.

The list has been drawn up by regulators under the auspices of the Financial Stability Board, in an effort to pre-empt systemic risks from spreading around the world in any future financial crisis.

Insurers are considered systemically important for a variety of reasons: they might, for example, have a large lending arm, such as Aviva, or a complex financial engineering business, akin to that of Swiss Re.

Supervision spotlight

Banks
US
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Citigroup
Goldman Sachs
JPMorgan Chase
Morgan Stanley
Canada
Royal Bank of Canada
UK groups
Barclays
HSBC
Royal Bank of Scotland
Standard Chartered
Switzerland
Credit Suisse
UBS
France
BNP Paribas
Société Générale
Spain
BBVA
Santander
Japan
Mitsubishi UFJ
Mizuho
Nomura
Sumitomo Mitsui
Italy
Banca Intesa
UniCredit
Germany
Deutsche Bank
Netherlands
ING

Insurance groups
Aegon
Allianz
Aviva
Axa
Swiss Re
Zurich

The list, which is not public, contains many of the multinational bank names that would be widely expected.

The exercise follows the establishment of the FSB in the summer and is principally designed to address the issue of systemically important cross-border financial institutions through the setting up of supervisory colleges.

These colleges will comprise regulators from the main countries in which a bank or insurer operates and will have the job of better co-ordinating the supervision of cross-border financial groups.

As a spin-off from that process, the groups on the list will also be asked to start drawing up so-called living wills – documents outlining how each bank could be wound up in the event of a crisis.

Regulators are keen to see living wills prepared for all systemically important financial groups, but the concept has split the banking world, with the more complex groups arguing that such documents will be almost impossible to draft without knowing the cause of any future crisis.

National regulators, led by the UK, are known to have begun pilot-testing the living wills exercise with some of the listed banks in the past few weeks.