Foreign financial regulators are leaning on their Australian counterparts to smarten up aspects of their plans for intervention in the affairs of a failing bank should this occur.The "Peer Review of Australia" by the Financial Stability Board is the first on the country and only the FSB's fourth overall. The FSB is a financial regulator. It was bolted on to the Bank for International Settlements following the global financial crisis.The FSB urged authorities, primarily meaning the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Reserve Bank of Australia, to accelerate work on "recovery and resolution plans", known informally as "living wills", for the larger banks.According to the FSB peer review, work on the "recovery" aspect of these plans will stretch over 2012 for the four major banks, as well as for Suncorp and Macquarie."Resolution planning", the FSB said, will be "subsequently considered".The FSB also picked through some of the details of APRA's updated intervention powers that were worked out over recent years. These were increased partly in response to corresponding work by an IMF team in 2006. The financial crisis three years ago also served as a spur to decision-making.Finalisation of bank resolution arrangements with New Zealand (where Australian banks dominate the industry) is one wish of the FSB.A shorter time-frame for banks to develop a "single customer view" of customer deposit balances is another.The latter is needed to foster rapid payment by APRA of guaranteed deposits (which will now be capped at A$250,000, down from $1 million) under the Financial Claims Scheme.The FSB's advice on this point may go unheeded, as APRA yesterday announced that banks will have until the end of 2013 to develop a single customer view.According to the FSB's version of APRA's plans, banks may, in some cases, be given until the end of 2015 to comply.According to the FSB, "The current timetable is quite generous."The FSB also called for an increase in the standing parliamentary appropriation of $20 billion, to deal with a banking crisis, to bring it up to a level sufficient "to cover the deposits of the largest banks in Australia in a situation where a private sector purchaser is unwilling to accept the assets of the failed ADI."Officials from central banks in Turkey, China, France, South Africa and the UK, as well as FSB staff, undertook the review.