A distinctive system of institutions supervising the Polish financial market has been formed on the basis of the legislative works prepared since the beginning of the Polish system reforms (after 1989). In their essence, the supervisory mechanisms established at the time were aimed at protecting the interest of those clients who entrusted their funds to the financial market.

For this reason, the objective of the article was to analyse the existing supervisory institutions, their competence, as well as the organisational framework established to support their activities in accordance with the legal status as at 31 December, 2002.

The author focuses on the key supervisory institutions responsible for the stability of financial markets: the Banking Supervision Commission, The Insurance and Pension Funds Supervision Commission and the Securities and Stock Exchange Commission, while disregarding other entities whose role is primarily to regulate the financial market, including the Competition and Consumer Protection Office, the National Bank of Poland, the General Inspector of Personal Data Protection, etc.).

The article is preceded by a short presentation of the supervisory institution as an important administrative and legal concept, which seems important for the proper analysis of construction and statutory empowerment of the entities that supervise activities performed on the financial market.

In the final part of the article, the author includes a separate list that allows the reader to learn about and compare the core organisational construction of the supervisory entities and their set of instruments provided by the law-makers.

The author advocates the need for setting more precise principles of co-operation between the supervisory authorities and, in particular, considers the need to prepare a special act of law to regulate the rules of co-operation between the supervisory entities mentioned in the article. Such an act could underlie the establishment of a single mechanism or even a single supervisory institution that would become a strong and effective executor of supervisory tasks over the whole Polish financial market, similar to the British Financial Services Authority. It is important, since the future of the Polish financial market will probably be based on large financial groups composed of one or two banks, an insurance company, a brokerage house and a pension fund. Even today, groups of this kind are not rare in Poland. Therefore, assurance of even tighter relations between the supervisory bodies would enhance co-ordination of supervisory activities in all sectors of the financial market.