Can you explain the importance of IFRs 9 to financial institutions?

1. Reassessing the granularity (e.g., facility-level provisioning analysis) and/or credit loss impairment modeling approach (e.g., consistency regarding the definition of default between Basel and IFRS 9 models).
2. Enhancing coordination across their finance, risk, and business units.

the most important thing is, IFRS 9 introduces a Business Model test that requires an entity to assess whether its business objective for a debt instrument is to collect the contractual cash flows of the instrument as opposed to realising its fair value change from sale prior to its contractual maturity.

Please note the following key points :

1. The assessment of a business model is not made at an individual financial instrument level.

2. The assessment is based on how key management personal actually manage the business, rather than management's intentions for specific financial assets.

3. An entity may have more than one business model for managing its financial assets and the classification need not be determined at the reporting entity level. For example, it may have one portfolio of investments that it manages with the objective of collecting contractual cash flows and another portfolio of investment held with the objective of trading to realise changes in fair value. It would be appropriate for entities like these to carry our the assessment for classification purposes at portfolio level, rather than at entity level.

4. Although the objective of an entity's business model may be to hold financial assets in order to collect contractual cash flows, the entity need not hold all of those assets until maturity. Thus an entity's business model can be to hold financial assets to collect contractual cash flows even when sales of financial assets occur.

Also IFRS 9 provides detail guideline on classification and reclassification of Financial Assets and Liabilities and with guidelines on in which cases reclassifications are allowed.