(Yicai) Dec. 1 -- Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has moved up to the third bucket of the Financial Stability Board's list of Global Systemically Important Banks, or lenders so big that their failure could trigger a financial crisis, becoming the first Chinese bank to reach the tier.

Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, and China Construction Bank remain in bucket two, while Bank of Communications stayed in bucket one, according to the list released by the FSB on Nov. 27. No new Chinese lenders were named G-SIBs this year.

The buckets are a tiered system used to categorize the G-SIBs, with the fifth one, which has no banks in it, representing the highest systemic importance. JP Morgan Chase is the only bank in bucket four, while ICBC joined Europe's biggest bank HSBC Holdings and US' Citibank in bucket three, along with returning Bank of America. The 29 entries on this year's list remained unchanged from a year earlier.

Compared with previous years, there are two notable features in the score changes of Chinese G-SIBs this year, said Peng Li, deputy director of Fitch Bohua's financial institutions department. First, size is no longer the main driver for score increases, and second, the impact of exchange rates has played a boosting role, Peng noted.

The weighted assessment framework for G-SIBs uses the lenders' size, interconnectedness, substitutability, complexity, and global activity, with 13 secondary indicators, evaluating the systemic importance of banks based on weighted scoring.

"The scores of ICBC and BOC skyrocketed by 33 points and 32 points, respectively, thanks to the combined effect of multiple sub-factors," Peng said. "But Chinese G-SIBs still far exceed other global institutions in terms of size and interconnectedness.

"As of the end of the third quarter of this year, the total assets, interbank assets, and liabilities of most Chinese G-SIBs continued to rise steadily compared with early this year," he added, predicting that size and interconnectedness will continue to drive up their scores in the coming year.

Exchange rate fluctuations are bidirectional and may negatively impact the scores of Chinese banks next year, given recent changes, Peng noted.

After the new bucket classification, the additional capital requirement that ICBC needs to meet will rise to 2 percent from 1.5 percent. AgBank, BOC, and CCB will face additional capital regulatory requirements of 1.5 percent, and BoCOM of 1 percent.

Editor: Martin Kadiev