The news that President-elect Donald Trump’s team wants to move ahead with changing banking regulations is welcome in theory. In practice, however, much will depend on the details. The aim should be to simplify the supervisory authorities for the operation of the financial system, not just to make them obsolete.

Without a doubt, the current system is cumbersome. At the federal level – excluding a number of separate state regulators – three entities supervise banks, two supervise markets, one aims to protect consumers and the other deals with financial crimes. Many large institutions are subject to these principles. Senior managers at a mid-sized bank today spend about 42% of their time on compliance-related tasks.

Much of this system was designed decades ago for a simpler world. A glaring example is the separation of the Capital Market Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. One was established 90 years ago to protect stock and bond investors. The other was created 50 years ago to oversee commodity markets and related futures and options.

Today, when many financial firms trade in both markets, the two supervisors often overlap and do not always communicate properly. In 2011, after the chaotic bankruptcy of MF Global Holdings Ltd., a subsequent congressional investigation showed how authorities failed to coordinate, arguing over how to safeguard its clients’ money.

Such fragmentation is problematic by global standards, and policymakers have been calling for a combination of the two for decades. Because, however, it is common practice for common sense politics to prevail: the House Agriculture Committee did not want to submit to the CFTC’s regulatory powers.

If Trump wants relatively straightforward reform, this would be a good place to start. Merging the two commissions will help streamline rules, reduce costs and facilitate cooperation with overseas regulators. It would be an ambitious change but not radical: Both a former CFTC commissioner and a current SEC commissioner have supported the idea.

Reforming banking supervision would be less straightforward. It’s true that the US has too many regulators – including the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. – except for state banking authorities. But this cannot be solved by simple solutions. Simply bringing the FDIC under the Treasury Department, as the Trump team is considering, will likely create more problems than it solves.

A better approach would be to create a single prudential authority tasked with protecting the financial system. The new body could be overseen by a board that would include representatives from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the FDIC, while the OCC would be abolished entirely. Ideally, it would also oversee non-bank firms, such as asset managers, that play an important role in the system. Such a regulator could focus more on key risks. It would be less susceptible to influence from the companies it supervises and could (in theory) lead to streamlined compliance.

Such far-reaching reforms would require political skill and sustained effort, which was not one of the hallmarks of Trump’s previous term. Ambition is equally commendable. In regulation as in life, simplicity is a virtue.

The Bloomberg Opinion editorial team