The G20 is meeting today and tomorrow and among the items of its agenda is finalizing the new, stricter capital requirements that Basel III will mandate for banks.

And also insurers?

Perhaps, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision are considering including insurers and clearing houses in measures to safeguard the world economy from crises at so-called systemically important financial institutions, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks are private … “Systemic relevance does not depend on an insurer’s size, but on the nature of the business,” Allianz SE Chief Financial Officer Oliver Baete said in a conference call yesterday. “Defining systemic relevance by size is wrong. I would always be watching for weak business models as those could become systemically relevant faster than we all can imagine.”

Obviously, many insurers disagree.

“We firmly believe that insurers, if they keep to their core business, are not systemically relevant as banks are, and we are very confident that politicians will clearly see that difference,” Joerg Schneider, chief financial officer at Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, said in a conference call Nov. 9. “We regard ourselves as not systemically relevant and we are quite convinced that this is economically sound.”

What do you think?