Abstract. The new own funds adequacy device, officialy named “ International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards”, describes the most important benchmark framework for micro-prudential supervision at the moment. The publication of the final text in June 2004, after five years of deliberations, represents the result of multiple analyses and comments provided by all interested parties, banking supervision authorities, associations and credit institutions. Provided the development of complex methodologies of risk measurement and management, on a large scale, by credit institutions, simple and static rules of the first accord have become less and less relevant during the last years. And so, the need of setting up a own funds adequacy framework which is much more risk sensitive and provides incentives to credit institutions on what concerns the improvement of risk measurement and management systems was met by approval of the Basel II Accord, which will, therefore, lead to the strengthening of financial stability. The revisal of the Accord was mainly focused on the increase of risk analysis and internal measurement and the changes made to their estimation allow banks to create their own methodological framework to calculate capital requirements (also considering each credit institution’ risk appetite).

Keywords: Basel II; credit risk; internal rating models; probablity of default; validation process.