Supervision Department

The Supervision Department has three major roles.

Firstly, it is responsible for making recommendations on the licensing of new banks and the ongoing prudential supervision of all the commercial banks in Samoa. To do this, it gathers considerable amounts of information about the operations of the banks, visits the banks to review their operations and analyses the data it has gathered.

The analysis can provide significant clues about the financial status of the bank. For example, standard ratios are calculated to see how they match up against legal requirements and how they are changing over time. Particular problems can be reviews to see if improvements in the situation are appearing.

In this way, the Department is able to judge whether a bank is performing well or poorly, and can, if necessary, require alterations to its current operating procedures. The end purpose is to ensure that poor deposited with banks by their customers.

However, the Central Bank does not guarantee that depositors will always get their money back.

The Bank also undertakes broad oversight of non-bank financial institutions in the interests of financial stability.
Part of the job is to ensure that the Department's own procedures are up to international standards and much time is spent reviewing how this work is done overseas in an effort to make sure that the Bank is doing its work as well as it can.

The second role for the Department is to make sure that the financial system is operating efficiently. As financial transactions are a significant part of the lives of both individuals and businesses, an inefficient financial system can waste a lot of time and money. Ensuring that the payments system, both domestic and international, is working properly and that there are enough competitors in the various financial markets is important to development of the country.

An essential aspect of this job is the publication of the various fees and charges of the commercial banks, to allow members of the public to compare the costs of the services of the banks.

It is not part of the Central Bank's duties to look at the complaints of individual bank customers, but should the general practices of the banks cause problems, the Bank will discuss the issue with the bank concerned.

Finally, we pointed out earlier that the Central Bank is now Samoa's Money Laundering Authority.

The Supervision Department handles this task, collecting and analyzing information in an effort to detect any funds that may have been obtained by illegal activities.