Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Thursday that he will submit to Congress legislative language on a new consumer protection agency in the next few days, but is also working on regulatory reform plans that use existing authorities.

Geithner, speaking to reporters after a meeting of top U.S. financial regulators, said that key Democratic congressional leaders have set out an ambitious work plan for the Obama administration's reform proposals and there was a lot of work ahead.

The Treasury chief said specific language for other core parts of the plan will be sent to Capitol Hill in coming weeks according to schedules laid out by U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, and House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank.

We're moving now the next stage of this process. It's going to have an important legislative component to it, but outside that process, also we're going try to make sure we're making progress on the range of things that people can do to make these markets safer, more stable, (with a) more balanced mix of innovation and stability in the future, Geithner said.

Outside of the legislative process, he said the Treasury and top regulatory agencies would work together on proposals that utilize their existing authorities. These include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators.

We're going to run a process where we try to refine those proposals together, Geithner said.

Examples of these include SEC draft regulations on money market mutual funds to make them less susceptible to runs, and SEC and CFTC proposals for oversight of over-the-counter derivatives.

He added that the Treasury and regulators, which form the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, would also begin a process for a broader review of supervisory lessons learned in the financial crisis, including starting a process for refining specific proposals for improving capital requirements for financial institutions.

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