The Financial Stability Oversight Council, the country’s top financial regulatory body, moved closer yesterday to increasing its oversight of nonbank financial institutions such as hedge funds, private equity funds and insurers, The New York Times reported.

The 10-member council, headed by the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, voted unanimously to adopt a rule that will designate some of those firms as “systemically important financial institutions” and put them under stronger regulatory supervision.

The rule “is an important tool provided in Dodd-Frank (Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) for extending the perimeter of transparency, oversight and prudential supervision over parts of the financial system that can be a particularly important source of credit to the economy and potentially important source of risk,” Geithner said during the 10-minute meeting.

The oversight council will now begin a three-part process of determining which firms are subject to additional scrutiny from regulators. The Dodd-Frank law, which passed in the summer of 2010, automatically put banks with more than $50 billion in assets under stricter standards.

Regulators will initially examine all nonbank firms with more than $50 billion in assets. Those that cross any one of a number of other thresholds – holding more than $3.5 billion in derivative liabilities, $20 billion in debt, or having high leverage ratios, for instance – would move on to another round of assessment.

The council left itself space to evaluate firms even if they do not meet the initial criteria for consideration. “The council does not believe that a determination decision can be reduced to a formula,” it said in the rule, affirming its ability to analyze a firm “irrespective of whether such company meets the thresholds.”