Recognizing the system risk, SBP has stiffened its licensing policy and regulatory capital requirements and has increased the paid up capital requirements for banks to $ million. 4 Positioning themselves accordingly, a few banks have injected fresh capital or amalgamated with other financial institutions to meet these requirements.
In order to mitigate the pandemic related stress on banks and as a measure to enable capital conservation, banks are being allowed to utilise 100 per cent of floating provisions/countercyclical provisioning buffer held by them as on December 31, 2020 for making specific provisions for non-performing assets with prior approval of their Boards.