International Organization of Securities Commissions - History

History

IOSCO was born in 1983 from the transformation of its ancestor the ‘inter-American regional association’ (created in 1974) into a truly international cooperative body. This decision to expand the organisation beyond the Americas was made at the annual gathered in Quito, Ecuador in April 1983. At the same time the organisation was renamed to IOSCO to reflect the expanded membership beyond North and South America.

The securities regulators from France, Indonesia, Korea and the United Kingdom were the first agencies to join the membership from outside the Americas. The IOSCO July 1986 Paris Annual Conference was the first to take place outside of the American continents and on that occasion a decision was made to create a permanent General Secretariat for the Organization.

One remnant of its early inter-American roots is that IOSCO's "official" languages are English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

In 1998 IOSCO started work on a number of important policies that led to broader set of guidelines. However it was the September 11, 2001 attacks as well as a series of large global financial scandals that started with Enron and including Worldcom, Parmalat and Vivendi that brought urgency to this work and heralded IOSCOs evolution from an international “talk shop”, where little of substance was accomplished, to a serious international organization with a real impact on the securities regulation.

At the May 1999 annual conference, held in Lisbon, it was decided to have a permanent headquarter for the administrative General Secretariat and that it should be based in Madrid, Spain.

In 2002 IOSCO adopted a multilateral memorandum of understanding (IOSCO MOU) designed to facilitate cross-border enforcement and exchange of information among the international community of securities regulators.