The umbrella supervisor's responsibilities are clearly focused on protecting the insured and regulated depository subsidiaries of financial holding companies. Under this overall framework, the umbrella supervisor is to rely on the functional regulator as much as possible and is allowed to examine functionally regulated affiliates if, and only if, it believes that their activities are creating undue risk for the insured depository affiliate.
Information on monetary policy developments, economic developments, bank information, data and statistics are now available. The financial environment is changing very rapidly – more so now than at any period in our history and this is being driven by the proliferation of modern information technology.