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Andrea Enria, chairperson of the EBA, concluded presenting the report: "I would like to say that I am glad to see that the comments provided by many stakeholders in the framework of the review of the ESFS that I was mentioning earlier acknowledge the importance of the work accomplished by the EBA. Indeed, the praise should be addressed first and foremost to the EBA staff, as the progress made would not have been possible without their effort and commitment. They worked hard in a challenging environment, characterised by very tight deadlines and resource constraints.
I also have to recognise that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve our objectives without the help of the national supervisory authorities (NSAs), which have contributed to the technical work and often have positively responded to our calls for support, dedicating experienced staff to work with us. Last but not least, my thanks have to go to the Board of Supervisors, the main decision-making body of the EBA, the Management Board, and their individual members. The governance of the EBA is not simple, but this has never prevented us from delivering very complex pieces of work on time, without compromising on quality in order to achieve consensus.
In 2014 I see a new phase for the EBA’s work. The banking union is a major change in the institutional environment, which also calls for a strategic refocusing of our work. The centralisation of prudential supervisory responsibilities at the European Central Bank (ECB) will provide further impetus to the need to develop a single rulebook; the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) cannot perform its tasks with major differences in the rules to be applied within its jurisdiction. At the same time, differences between the rules in Member States inside and outside the SSM would risk opening a fracture within the single market. Similarly, as the majority of cross-border groups have establishments within and outside the SSM, we will have to make sure that home–host cooperation develops smoothly in the new institutional environment, also through an increasing reliance on mediation. Cooperation with the ECB has started in earnest, and the AQR and stress test this year will be an important common endeavour. As prudential supervision takes up a European dimension, consumer protection should also be stepped up, possibly with stronger legal underpinning for our work.
Summary of the 2013 Annual Report