FACTBOX - Highlights of UK financial reform proposals

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a shakeup of global supervision of financial markets on Wednesday to crack down on excessive risk-taking that he believes contributed to the credit crunch.

A British document circulated at a European Union summit said the world needed a new financial and regulatory architecture to update the global financial institutions established by the 1944 Bretton Woods conference.

Among the main points, Brown called for the following steps by the end of the year:

-- Changes by the International Accounting Standards Board must be rapidly implemented to address concerns that the application of fair value accounting may be exacerbating the downward spiral of asset prices. The EU adopted the change on Wednesday and it takes effect immediately, backdated to July

-- Banks should make further best practice risk disclosures in their financial reports. Banking supervisors are already monitoring reports and calling for improvements

-- The Basel Committee of banking supervisors should immediately set forth strengthened capital requirements for banks' securitisation activities to restore confidence and enable a market to be re-established. The Basel Committee is already consulting on beefing up aspects of capital requirements and the European Commission has proposed tougher rules on securitisation at banks

-- National authorities should set up 30 supervisory colleges that would cooperate on regulating major cross-border financial institutions. Attempts to set up colleges to oversee insurers have floundered as nearly half of EU states balk at giving up powers to a cross-border company's home regulator. A similar system has also been proposed for banks.

By the spring 2009 meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Britain said urgent work was needed to:

-- prepare proposals to tackle executive pay that encourages excessive and irresponsible risk-taking by financial institutions. The European Commission is already studying this.