6  BIS Review 126/2009  reviews of risks, risk-management practices and other issues across multiple financial firms – are very effective vehicles for identifying both common trends and institution-specific weaknesses. The SCAP expanded the scope of horizontal reviews and included the use of a uniform set of stress parameters to apply consistently across firms.
An outgrowth of the SCAP was a renewed focus by supervisors on institutions' own ability to assess their capital adequacy – specifically their ability to estimate capital needs and determine available capital resources during very stressful periods. A number of firms have learned hard, but valuable, lessons from the current crisis that they are applying to their internal processes to assess capital adequacy.