For like its television counterparts, the commission is regarded with a mixture of fear, awe and feigned indifference; but there is no doubt that for the banking industry there is no more important Government initiative.
This week, the commission's five members will appear in public for the first Supra Strapped time. On Friday, Sir John Vickers, the former chief economist of the Bank of England and the IBC's chairman, will release a discussion paper outlining the broad issues of the report.
For the commission the stakes are high. The Government expects the IBC to provide the intellectual backbone for what could be the biggest shake up of the British banking sector in a generation, while senior banking chiefs are hoping not to see their worst fears realised.
Already, dark warnings have emerged from bankers that any radical change could lead to major UK Supra Suprano Shoes banks such as HSBC and Standard Chartered quitting the UK for more welcoming jurisdictions such as Hong Kong or Singapore.
Others, among them the former City Minister, Lord Myners, have argued that the commission's report, which will be published next year, is largely irrelevant given the speed at which international regulation is moving.
Conscious of these criticisms, Sir John has met senior managers at most of the UK's large banks, holding private meetings at the commission's Holborn offices with bankers such as Barclays chief executive, John Varley, and Royal Bank of Scotland boss, Stephen Hester, as well as industry representatives such as Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers' Association.
At these meetings, Sir John is understood to have attempted to calm suspicions over the objectives of the commission, which has often been characterised as a vehicle for providing the justification for a UK version of the US's Glass-Steagall Act which separated American retail banks and Supra Skytop High investment banks for nearly 70 years.
Much of the speculation surrounding the commission has focused on which way its members are likely to be inclined on the issue of the break-up of UK-based universal banks such as Barclays and HSBC, which both operate large, highly-profitable investment arms.
Barclays' investment banking arm, Barclays Capital, creates more than half the bank's profits and the firm is likely to hit hard against any attempt to order it to spin-off the business. HSBC is perennially rumoured to be set to move headquarters to Hong Kong after its chief executive, Michael Geoghegan, re-located there at the start of the year.
Finance sector leaders have pored over the CVs of the commission panel, searching for hints. Take Bill Winters, the former co-chief executive of US investment bank JP Morgan who is assumed to be in favour of the existing structure of the industry, while Martin Taylor, the former Barclays chief executive responsible for selling off large parts of the bank's investment business, is thought to be more supportive of separation.
For the commission's other members, Clare Spottiswoode, the former director general of Ofgas, and Martin Wolf, the Financial Times' chief economics writer, arguments can be made either way on their views. Last week Mr Wolf wrote a trenchant article arguing that the new Basel III capital requirements did not go far enough and suggested that he was heartily tired of the "special pleading" of the "pampered" banking industry.
In reality, none of the commissioners' views can be taken as a given and there is still several months of evidence gathering, interviews, debate and analysis ahead. George Osborne, the Chancellor, has said that he is struck by breadth of opinion on the issue of a split – whether it is the former chancellor on one side, Lord Lawson, saying that banks should be cut down to size, or Alistair Darling saying it would not solve any future financial crisis.
The public might get some sense of the debate from a series of open sessions at which commissioners will meet audiences comprised of senior industry figures, finance professionals and interested citizens.
These debates are designed to give the chance for a variety of opinions to be aired and the Federation of Small Businesses and the CBI are being courted as potential co-hosts.
More substantively, the chief executives of the major UK banks will be subject to single-party hearings, modelled on those used by the Competition Commission, at which they will be questioned in-depth on various aspects of their business.
In preparation, banks are already putting together dedicated teams to cope with the expected workload the commission will generate. RBS is expected to have upwards of 100 staff working full or part-time on responding to requests for information and it is likely that other banks will be devoting similar numbers of people to dealing with what is seen as a potential existential threat to the banking industry's current business model.
At the commission itself, which is housed on the sixth floor of an office in the heart of London formerly occupied by the Competition Commission, the staff are gearing up for a frenetic 12 months.
The watchword for all their work so far has been neutrality. Nothing is more important to the IBC than the perception that it starts from a balanced viewpoint, with equal weight given to arguments from all sides.
On a day-to-day basis, the secretariat has been providing each commissioner with reams of reading material ranging from academic papers on the banking industry to updates on the latest regulatory initiatives to prepare them for the work ahead.
Commission members are all unpaid with the exception of Sir John, who receives a monthly salary of ￡5,000 for two days work.
This week's publication of the discussion paper will certainly ratchet up the workload for the IBC's permanent staff as banks begin replying to questionnaires and ad-hoc requests for information.
Amid all the attention focused on the potential for the IBC to recommend a split up of retail and investment banks it is easy to forget that this is unlikely to be top of the commission's agenda.
One major part, perhaps even the most important part of the commission's work, will be taking an overdue look at the issue of competition in retail banking, as well as a broad investigation of systemic risk in banks.
The broadness and length of the commission – it will not publish its report until September 2011 – has led some to criticise the process. Lord Myners describes it is an "unnecessary distraction".
"All this is going to do is create a prolonged period of uncertainty for banks at a time when they should be concentrating on more important things like increasing lending," he said.
Lord Myners' views are privately shared by some senior figures at UK banks. "We are not for or against it, but we do think that the issues it is looking at are not necessarily relevant to solving the problems that we saw during the crisis," says one executive.
The Cabinet Committee on Banking, which is chaired by Osborne, and deputy chaired by Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, will get the first look at the report when it is completed next summer.
Mr Cable's support for breaking up the banks is well known, but Mr Osborne's views are less clear. Some suggest his focus may be more on engineering a restructuring of the competitive dynamics of the British banking industry and using the report as the basis to carve up partially state-owned banks Lloyds Banking Group and RBS.
While for the Conservatives the aim is to inject greater competition into the banking industry, the Liberal Democrats are more focused on splitting so-called "casino banking" operations from the mundane business of taking retail deposits and lending to business.
It is also important to remember that while the IBC is undoubtedly the most high-profile review underway, it is not the only one. The Office of Fair Trading is conducting its own inquiry into competition in retail banking as well as a probe into the equity underwriting market, both of which will feed into the commission's report.
There is also the Treasury Select Committee's report into free banking, which will look at whether the current provision of free bank accounts is stifling competition in the UK banking sector.
In addition is a slew of international regulatory initiatives underway. In November, the G20 is expected to agree a new set of capital rules for the global banking industry after an agreement was reached last Sunday on Basel III.
Europe's new supra-national -financial regulators will be another factor, with the creation at the start of next year of three new European Union supervisory authorities that will have direct powers to intervene in the markets of individual member states.
This regulatory soup makes for a complex and fast-moving background against which the IBC will have to prepare its report.
Juggling these competing demands will require a mixture of astute diplomacy, razor sharp political antennae and a single-minded focus on getting the job done. In this regard at least, opinion is unanimous that in Sir John, the Government has picked the best chairman.
"His rigour and intellectual seriousness mean that we have no doubt that the commission's report will be scrupulously fair-minded and undoubtedly the best work on these issues we could hope for," says one banking executive.
Whether that view will be same this time next year when the IBC reports is another thing. However, if Sir John and his fellow commissioners cannot produce the definitive report on how to reform the British banking industry it is unlikely that anyone else could do a better job.