Banks are set to face tougher international rules on the capital they must have on hand to cope with a change in interest rates, amid regulators' concerns that current standards may be too flimsy to fully capture the risks.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a group bringing together regulators such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB), proposed overhauling its current rules for interest-rate risk, including possible binding standards on how banks should measure their resilience to shock rate changes, and on the capital they should have to cover potential losses.

The work “is particularly important in the light of the current exceptionally low interest-rate environment in many jurisdictions,” the Basel committee said June 8 in a statement on its website. The committee wants to ensure that “banks have appropriate capital to cover potential losses from exposures to changes in interest rates.”