September 08, 2006	Friday	Sha'aban 14, 1427

KARACHI, Sept 7: The State Bank has announced to restructure its various departments and sections to improve their working. State Bank Governor Dr Shamshad Akhtar on Thursday communicated to the staff the revised organisation structure of the bank.

“The reorganisation of the State Bank was finalised after comprehensive review and deliberations across the organisation at different levels, including the corporate management team and the heads of departments,” said a press release issued by the SBP.

This reorganisation has been introduced in order to strengthen SBP’s internal governance systems and restructure and modernise itself in line with the best practices of other central banks and in the light of the developments that had taken place across Pakistan’s financial markets, it added.

The main feature of restructuring involves setting up of four distinct clusters that included Banking Cluster, Monetary Policy and Research Cluster (MPR Cluster) Financial Markets and Reserve Management Cluster (FMR Cluster) and Corporate Services Cluster (CS Cluster).

Each of the four clusters will be headed by a deputy governor or an executive director.

The Banking Cluster has been restructured to assign high priority and focus on the Development Finance Group (DFG) with enhanced focus for creating enabling environment to facilitate intermediation of market based/high priority credit and help develop capacities to better understand the new niche areas such as infrastructure, housing finance, Islamic banking, SME and microfinance.

Banking Policy and Regulation Group (BPRG) which, besides developing policy and regulation and performing licensing function, will be responsible for resolution of problem banks, promoting good corporate governance and facilitating strengthening of risk management, including compliance with Basle-II.

Banking Supervision Group (BSG) will be in charge of the on-site inspection of banks as well as resultant enforcement actions.

The Monetary Policy and Research Cluster has been restructured to strengthen, rationalise and streamline its role through separate departments of (1) Monetary Policy Department, (2) Economic Analysis Department, (3) Research Department and (4) Statistics and Data Warehouse Department.

A Financial Markets and Reserve Management Cluster has been set up to separately manage the (1) Domestic Markets and Monetary Management (2) International Markets and Investments (3) Financial Market Strategy and Conduct and Exchange Policy.

All corporate functions such as human resources, training, information system, settlement (back office), finance, library and museum and art gallery have been grouped under the Corporate Services Cluster.