The Importance and Diversity of Financial Market Participants

Banks remain the dominant actors, and even as the old government-mandated directed lending model has fallen by the wayside state-controlled intermediaries are frequently in pole position versus private and foreign competitors. By the roughest estimate of financial system depth that places size against GDP their footprint can be double securities players. Micro-finance, originally created to get credit to the rural poor, has surged across the globe and today these institutions are commercial and regulated as a subset of the banking sector. They have also appeared in nascent securities markets as issuers with examples including Bolivia and Cambodia. Non-bank institutional investors are the linchpins of capital markets, including broker-dealers with underwriting functions, and mutual-pension-insurance funds that conduct large transactions and exercise corporate governance. Latin America and Eastern Europe were in the vanguard of private pension creation, but fiscal contingencies and system atrophy over time undermined an in-built advantage. Voluntary global organizations and codes govern regulation and conduct in banking, securities, insurance, and pensions which emerging markets rarely duplicate since standards were originally geared more toward advanced economies, and local professional capacity is stretched thin. The central bank routinely has the outsized oversight role across the financial intermediary range, and although a single body for all non-banks is the recommended global trend this design is impractical in under-resourced supervisor experience.