Active management of intraday liquidity and intraday stress-testing should be a key part of a bank’s operations. Where once they might have been seen as a burdensome regulatory requirement, more and more banks are adopting them as best practice. There remain sound regulatory reasons for adoption but also clear-cut business ones, accelerated by the pandemic.
A lot of regulators have been pumping liquidity into the markets (€1.3 trillion from the European Central Bank, for instance). “2020 was all about preserving liquidity and the impact on liquidity buffers because of the considerable increase in risk,” says Shamim.