Banking & Financial Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 5

The systemic importance score of a bank is built from four indicators: size, interconnectedness, substitutability and complexity. Size carries the highest weight because the sheer scale of a bank's balance sheet decides how much damage its failure would do.

India applies Basel III with a stricter minimum: the capital to risk weighted assets ratio must be at least nine per cent, of which Common Equity Tier 1 must be at least 5.5 per cent and Tier 1 at least seven per cent.

The Board for Financial Supervision was constituted in November 1994 so that supervision of banks, select all-India financial institutions and non-banking financial companies would get undivided attention.

Withdrawal of PCA restrictions is considered when no parameter has breached a risk threshold across four continuous quarterly financial statements, and one of those four must be the audited annual financial statement.

The first set of mandatory actions, applied as soon as a bank crosses Risk Threshold 1, is a restriction on dividend distribution or remittance of profits, together with a requirement that the promoters, owners or the parent of a foreign bank infuse capital.

Under the revised framework the three indicators are the capital to risk weighted assets ratio or the Common Equity Tier 1 ratio for capital, the net non-performing assets ratio for asset quality, and the Tier 1 leverage ratio for leverage.

The revised framework applies to all scheduled commercial banks but expressly leaves out three categories: small finance banks, payments banks and regional rural banks.

In the 2025 list State Bank of India sits in bucket 4 and must hold an extra Common Equity Tier 1 cushion of 0.80 per cent of its risk weighted assets, over and above the normal minimum and the capital conservation buffer.

The PCA framework arranges breaches into three risk thresholds, each more serious than the last, and attaches mandatory corrective actions to each.

The 2017 framework watched capital, asset quality and profitability, with return on assets as the profitability indicator.

The Reserve Bank of India issued the D-SIB framework on 22 July 2014, setting out how banks would be picked for the sample, how their systemic importance score would be computed from size, interconnectedness, substitutability and complexity, and how much additional Common Equity Tier 1 capital each bucket would attract.

The lead bank is a coordinator, not a monopolist. It prepares the district credit plan, convenes the district forums through its Lead District Manager, brings banks and government departments to one table, watches for blocks and villages left without banking and reports progress to the state government and the Reserve…

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development prepares a Potential Linked Credit Plan for each district, estimating sector by sector how much credit the district can absorb, taking account of its soil, irrigation, cropping pattern, livestock, infrastructure and non-farm activity.

The Reserve Bank constituted a High Level Committee under its Deputy Governor Usha Thorat to review the Lead Bank Scheme after four decades, and the committee reported in 2009.

By tying every village to one branch, the Service Area Approach had removed the borrower's choice: a farmer served badly by his service area branch could not take his account elsewhere, and competition between branches disappeared.

A branch's service area was drawn up of roughly fifteen to twenty-five villages, chosen on the twin tests of proximity and contiguity so that the cluster could actually be served and surveyed by the staff of one branch.

The Service Area Approach took effect from April 1989 and carried the logic of the Lead Bank Scheme down to the individual branch.

The State Level Bankers' Committee was constituted in 1977 as the apex forum of a state, where all the commercial banks, the regional rural banks, the cooperative banks, the state government and the Reserve Bank meet to review credit flow and agree on the state's annual credit plan.

The Block Level Bankers' Committee is the lowest forum of the Lead Bank Scheme and exists so that the branches of a block, the block administration and the field level development agencies can settle practical questions of credit flow together.

The District Consultative Committee is the working coordination forum of the district, bringing together all the banks operating there, the district administration and the development agencies, and it is chaired by the District Collector so that the administration and the banks sit together under one authority.