Influence and Design: The (Geo)Political Economy of International Financial Surveillance

International regulatory cooperation increasingly operates under strained conditions shaped by transnational crises, domestic political shifts, and intensifying great power rivalry. Across issue areas, contestation is placing growing limits on the feasibility of cooperative governance, raising questions about how international institutions adapt or bend under pressure. At the center of this evolving landscape are international financial institutions (IFIs), whose primary governing tool, surveillance, seeks to steer national regulations toward convergence on international standards. This paper advances a *case-of* analysis, arguing that variation in institutional formality conditions the resilience of international cooperation under geopolitical strain. Empirically, the paper compares two influential but institutionally distinct financial surveillance instruments: the IMF’s Article IV consultations and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Regulatory Consistency Assessment Programme (RCAP). The IMF represents the highly formal end of the institutional spectrum, characterized by legalized mandates, formal voting procedures, and a relatively autonomous bureaucracy. Its Article IV reports provide macro-financial assessments articulated through narrative and evaluative language, allowing for interpretive discretion. By contrast, the BCBS operates as an informal transgovernmental network of domestic regulators. Its RCAP assessments are narrow in scope, template-based, highly standardized, and predominantly technical, leaving limited space for evaluative articulation. Building on this comparison, the paper examines how institutional formality and informality shape the expressive capacity of surveillance, and with it the ability of IFIs to withstand geopolitical sensitivity when assessing major powers, particularly the United States and China. Using a qualitative sentiment analysis informed by finance-specific sentiment dictionaries (Kaya & Reay 2019; Loughran & McDonald 2011), the study codes the evaluative language of a corpus of IMF Article IV and BCBS RCAP reports to identify patterned variation in criticism, leniency, rhetorical caution, and emphasis. Rather than treating tone as a direct outcome of political interference, the analysis focuses on how institutional design structures the available space for evaluative expression under conditions of rivalry. The findings suggest that institutional formality enhances the resilience of surveillance by preserving the capacity to articulate critical assessments, even when major powers are involved. By contrast, informality, while facilitating cooperation on issues that are sovereignty-sensitive, bends oversight toward narrowness and standardization, constraining visible critique. As a case of a broader trend affecting international cooperation across domains, the paper shows how geoeconomic rivalry does not uniformly undermine governance, but instead reconfigures it along institutional lines.