The Federal Reserve is meeting with lenders including Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., in addition to the Japanese and U.K. central banks, to discuss alternatives to the London interbank offered rate.

The discussion at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is aimed at developing reference rates based on risk-free or near risk-free rates, the Fed said in a statement. It follows recommendations made in a July report by the Financial Stability Board, a group of international regulators.

“The market is so dependent on LIBOR now that the process toward restructuring this critical benchmark is really complicated,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Washington-based research firm Federal Financial Analytics Inc. Regulators need to assess “what is the right way to measure, since we have learned the hard way that closed-door trader benchmarking is an accident waiting to happen.”

LIBOR benchmarks have been the center of a scandal since 2008. Investigators in Europe, the U.S. and Asia have probed allegations that traders at the world’s biggest banks manipulated the rates and similar benchmarks to benefit certain investment positions. That’s led to more than $6 billion in global fines.

Banks including Bank of America, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., Barclays and Citigroup Inc. asked a judge this month to throw out claims they cheated customers on interest-rate swaps and other LIBOR-based transactions.

Representatives from HSBC Holdings Plc, Wells Fargo & Co., Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group AG and BNP Paribas SA were scheduled to attend the meeting, the Fed said.

The Fed, the European Central Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and U.K. Financial Conduct Authority also were anticipated to have representatives at the session, according to the Fed’s statement. (Bloomberg)