쌍봉형(Twin Peaks) 금융감독기구 체제 도입 논의의 검토

Abstract

Recently, in relation to reforming the financial regulatory organizations in Korea, the issue of introducing a "twin peaks" financial regulator model is actively being discussed among scholars and practitioners. The "twin peaks" model refers to the model where a prudential regulator and a business conduct regulator are separately established and operated. While an integrated financial regulator supervises and regulates all financial institutions in all matters, the twin peaks regulators supervise financial institutions according to their respective objectives, i.e. a prudential supervisor focusing on prudential matters of financial institutions, and a business conduct regulator being involved in regulating business conduct of financial institutions in selling their financial products. This twin peaks model is currently adopted in the countries such as Australia, Netherlands, and New Zealand, and recently the United Kingdom is scheduled to implement this model in April 2013. This article intends to analyze the advantages and drawbacks of the twin peaks model, in particular based on the cases of operating in Australia and New Zealand, by interviewing the relevant officials of the regulators in those two countries. As a result, it is assessed that the twin peaks model has more or less advantages of specializing in each operation and contributing to the efficiency of the regulation and supervision (e.g, the business conduct regulator is specializing in legal matters and so is more effective with regard to protecting financial consumers.) On the contrary, it is revealed that the twin peaks model demonstrates drawbacks in the matters of (i) "underlap regulation", i.e., certain financial institutions (e.g. non-bank financial companies, securities firms and fund managers in Australia) are not actually regulated by either financial regulator in the matter of the prudential supervision, (ii) "overlap regulation", i.e., certain financial institutions are regulated by both regulators in the area of their certain businesses, (iii) the possibility of non-cooperation or non-exchange of financial information between the two regulators, in which case it may lead to the inefficiency of financial regulation, and (iv) "commercial imbalance" regulation, i.e., a prudential regulator may engage in an excessive or over-prudential regulation disregarding the demand or environment of financial markets. This article is cautious about introducing the twin peaks model in Korea, because the drawbacks rather than the advantages are highly likely to happen in Korea and in particular the two regulators are not likely to cooperate each other or exchange information between them well, taking into account the situations of conflicts and non-cooperation between the current two regulators (i.e., the Financial Services Commission, the financial regulation policy decision-making agency, and the Financial Supervisory Service, the financial regulation execution agency).