I'm here with Philip Alexander, the senior editor, and we're previewing the special edition of the Banker

for the IMF annual meetings, which are in Lima, Peru, in October.

And Philip, I mean, we've got all the usual things in the IMF edition,

we've got an interview with Christy McGrath, the managing director of the IMF and a whole range of viewpoints from finance, business.

But one of the interesting things we've also got is a Bank Safety Ranking,

and it's the first time we've ever done one. Why did the Banker decide to do a Bank Safety Ranking?

Well Brian, because every July we produce the Top 1000 World Banks Ranking,

but that's just ranked by size, essentially the size of the tier one capital.

As we know, that doesn't necessarily mean that the bank is safe, in fact, during the financial crisis,

some of the largest banks in the world were the ones that gone into trouble.

So what we've done is we've taken the 250 largest banks in the world, so the ones that are most significant in terms of financial stability,

and also have the most data available on them. And we've ranked them according to a series of indicators that we think reflect the safety of the bank.

Okay, I mean it's pretty complex business isn't it?

I mean, ranking bank safety. So what sorts of indicators have we used?

So we looked at the capital ratio, how well capitalized they are, but we've also looked at profitability, sustain, whether that sustained.

We've looked at asset quality, how many bad loans they have, we've looked at how they fund themselves.

Are they, more or less, dependent on wholesale funding, which as we know from the crisis, can dry up.

All of that information comes from the Banker database, we've also pulled in one set of numbers from beyond the Banker database,

which is, we wanted to look at the operating environment for the banks.

So obviously, even the best-run banks in the world, if you're operating in a conflict zone, things could go wrong.

So for that we've taken the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development, they have country risk classifications,

which are designed to tell you the risk of, really of its export credits to those countries, so it looks at that kind of things.

Okay, and which types of banks have come out well in this ranking?

First of all, some more specialized banks have done well because of the business model.

So for instance, we've got banks that are essentially asset managers with a banking license or custodian banks that look after client's assets.

So they don't have lending risks.

Exactly. In terms of universal banks, one bank in the United States noticeably came out very well which is Wells Fargo.

They've been profitable for quite a while, they've also got a much higher capital ratio than a lot of other big American banks.

In terms of regions, the region that really did quite well was the gulf state, and in particular Saudi Arabia.

A lot of Saudi banks came high up in the ranking. They've had good profitability, also they're very well capitalized.

Okay, alright. So this is the first time, are we gonna carry on doing it next year?

Absolutely, I mean from what we've seen it's an interesting ranking.

And also we think that there are some enhancements we can make; we learn as we go along.

We're hoping to get a bit more data, and in particular being able to stretch some of the data back over a long time period,

so we can tell the things like profitability and not just recent, but do they have a track record of maintaining that kind of profitability over time.

Okay, thank you very much, we look forward to the September issue of the Banker.