Today policymakers in all the countries, shaken by the financial crisis of the 2007-2008, are carefully reconsidering the features of their supervisory architecture. Over the last ten years the financial supervision architecture and the role of the central bank in supervision therein has undergone radical transformation. In the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis, more countries are considering reforms, while others, who went through a round of reforms, are looking at the architecture once again. This paper reviews the insights gained by the literature on this topic and, based on updated information on 102 countries for the period 1998-2008, addresses three questions: which are the main features of the supervisory architecture reshaping? What explains the increasing diversity of the institutional settings? What are so far the effects of the changing face of banking and financial supervisory regimes on the quality of regulation and supervision?