Briefs: Union Bank waits, cross-border lending veil raised and margin principles published

Union Bank of India hopes to upgrade its representative office in Sydney to branch status within a year. The bank's managing director, Shri D. Sarkar, told Indian media over the weekend that the bank presently has only one branch outside India, in Hong Kong. In addition to Sydney, Union Bank aims to establish branches in Dubai and London.

More data on the cross-border exposures of banks and other financiers will be made available from next year. At present, data collected by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and published by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Bank for International Settlements masks data for more than a dozen jurisdictions of interest, including Canada, Germany, Ireland and Italy. APRA said in a notice posted on its website last week that the International Monetary Fund wanted more data disclosed on Australian banks.

The wheels are turning on proposals to mandate some form of margin requirement on derivative contracts that are not cleared through a central counter-party. On Friday, the Bank for International Settlements published seven "key principles". Two of these are that margin practices need to be "appropriate" and that margin collateral needs to be "highly liquid andâ€¦ able to hold their value in a time of financial stress."