APRA may enforce a quicker transition to key Basel III rules, a move that could lead to some of the tougher rules arriving years before global regulators require them.The global Basel III rules agreed last December are due to be phased in between 2013 and 2019. But Australian banks and other authorised deposit-taking institutions already meet or nearly meet the central Basel III capital rules.Wayne Byres, executive general manager for diversified institutions at APRA, told a Melbourne seminar yesterday that the global transition timetable has "a very long lead-time". The prudential regulator was considering whether the Australian banking industry needed such a long transition period to the new capital rules.If the longer transition was not needed, he said, there was a virtue in being able to declare Australian banks compliant with Basel III capital rules ahead of schedule. APRA plans to issue discussion papers on capital and liquidity in the middle of this year. A quicker transition would be unlikely to cause difficulties for most Australian banks. The suggestion could, however, unsettle markets, which have recently appeared sensitive to the operation of Basel III rules.Byres and APRA have repeatedly stressed that Australian banks are well-placed to meet the capital rules without substantial capital raisings. Byres' "diversified institutions" role puts him in charge of supervision of the major banks. He was speaking at the Basel III seminar for Melbourne members of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.Byres also confirmed yesterday that APRA and the Reserve Bank of Australia have substantial work still to do to decide how they will price the planned new RBA liquidity facility. The facility is designed to meet the shortfall between Australia's available high-quality liquid assets and the total of liquid assets that banks need to hold under Basel III rules."We don't know yet how we will price the facility," Byres said.APRA and the RBA have said the facility will be priced so as not to distort markets, but also so as to encourage banks to hold Commonwealth government and semi-government securities. As was pointed out in another presentation to the seminar - by NAB's head of group capital and funding, Nicholas De Crespigny - some 73 per cent of these CGS and "semis" are currently held overseas.