Currently, only a few banks disclose market and credit risk management figures for their non-trading activities. The disclosure is voluntary and non-systematic. The depth of coverage is quite different from one bank to another (see for instance the detailed discussions on credit loss provisions and on highly leveraged transactions in the Bankers Trust annual report or on non-performing loans in the Bank of Norway annual report). This situation will change in the near future due to recent regulatory harmonisation efforts (e.g. the 1997 BIS guidelines on interest rate risk management for banks) and due to developments in quantitative tools both for asset/liability management and for loan portfolios and off-balance sheet item credit exposure monitoring. Needless to say, recent losses in the domestic real estate market and the international emerging and OECD debt markets (the Asian, Japanese and more recently Russian financial crises, etc.) will contribute to reinforce this trend.

Derivatives trading is no longer considered to be the only wild beast which can lead a first class financial institution to go bankrupt (remembering Barings) since the same threat can also result from a high concentration of bad loans in domestic or international financial markets. Finally, the recent merger trend has created not only mega-banks but also financial conglomerates (such as the Credit Suisse Group) for which trading is only one of numerous business lines involved. These developments will contribute to the need to assess, globally and accurately, the risk exposures faced by a consolidated entity.