08 October 2004

Speech of Mr Roldan, Chair of CEBS, on Capital Requirements Directive

In his keynote address on the BBA Annual Supervision Conference held in London, Mr Roldan, chair of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) said that the successful implementation of Basel II is critical for the banking sector as well as for us as supervisors. However, there are certain areas where CEBS does not agree with the responses received on the last consultation paper on 'The application of the supervisory review process under pillar 2”.

“I am conscious that large parts of the industry have argued that the whole Supervisory Review Process should be driven by the institution and should be responsibility of the firm management and should be integral to the management of the firm. That is not exactly how we see the Process” he said. “Our consultation paper recognises that the firms’ process and the supervisory review are separate processes. CEBS will publish a full compendium of standards or principles based on our work on Pillar 2, which could act as a guide book for the industry and for supervisors.”

On common EU reporting a 'common way' of reporting the Solvency Ratio, giving to each supervisor the (limited) possibility of requiring some specific information outside the common reporting should be agreed. “To achieve this CEBS is investigating technical solutions to enable common reporting on a platform by which different data streams could be processed” he said.

With regard to the large number of regulatory options left open to national discretion in the Commission's draft Directive Mr Roldan reported that “the Chair of the Banking Advisory Committee (BAC) asked CEBS to perform a stock-take to identify how these options are likely to be exercised in the different jurisdictions and whether they were perceived as indispensable from a supervisory point of view. It was also noted that this analysis could then form the basis for a proposal to the Commission as to which discretions might be removed from the draft Directive“.

Full speech

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