The Securities Commission of The Bahamas last week hosted securities regulators from 18 jurisdictions across the Americas to discuss cross-cutting securities regulatory matters, further developing the capital markets regulator’s regional and international profile.

The meeting, held 3-4 November at the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island, was the second of two general meetings of the Inter-American Regional Committee (IARC) of IOSCO and the Council of Securities Regulators of the Americas (COSRA) held in 2016.

Mrs. Tonya Bastian Galanis, Commission Chairman, welcomed the group to The Bahamas at the commencement of the meeting. She noted, “Meetings such as these ultimately help us to increase the effectiveness of our regulation in this ever changing global landscape but importantly they also demonstrate locally the importance of the financial services sector to our country and that we are committed to sound regulation and hopefully signals the same to the international community.”

Commission Executive Director Christina Rolle commented that hosting the IARC/COSRA meeting advanced a Commission initiative to enhance its international profile as an engaged regulator committed to best practices. “The Commission identified increased participation with regional and international securities regulatory bodies as strategically important to better position it to respond to developments in global securities markets and their regulation, and to achieve better representation of local regulatory concerns to international standard setting bodies,” she said.

The Chair of IARC is the Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores de México (National Banking and Securities Commission of Mexico/CNBV). CNBV’s Vice President, Securities Supervision, Mr. Eduardo Flores Herrera, moderated the meeting. “We took away a lot of challenges. I think the idea of this sort of meeting is that we all end up having markets that are equally developed to our own economies,” Mr. Flores said. “So there is a lot of room to grow and a lot of room to work and to promote more engagement by all the countries.”

In addition to securities regulators, various international bodies were represented at the meeting. For example, te IOSCO General Secretariat was represented by Mr. Tim Pinkowski, Policy Advisor, while the Inter-American Bank (IDB) was represented by Ms. Florencia Attademo-Hirt, Representative for The Bahamas.