The regulation contains the detailed prudential requirements for credit institutions and investment firms and it covers:

 

• Capital: The Commission’s proposal increases the amount of own funds banks need to hold as well as the quality of those funds. It also harmonises the deductions from own funds in order to determine the amount of regulatory capital that is prudent to recognise for regulatory purposes.

• Liquidity: To improve short-term resilience of the liquidity risk profile of financial institutions, the Commission proposes the introduction of a Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) - the exact composition and calibration of which will be determined after an observation and review period in 2015.

• Leverage ratio: In order to limit an excessive build-up of leverage on credit institutions' and investment firms' balance sheets, the Commission also proposes that a leverage ratio be subject to supervisory review. Implications of a leverage ratio will be closely monitored prior to its possible move to a binding requirement on 1 January 2018.

• Counter party credit risk: Consistent with the Commission's policy vis-à-vis OTC (over the counter) derivatives, changes are made to encourage banks to clear OTC derivatives on CCPs (central counterparties).

• Single rule book: The financial crisis highlighted the danger of divergent national rules. A single market needs a single rule book. The regulation is directly applicable without the need for national transposition, and accordingly eliminates one source of such divergence. The regulation also sets a single set of capital rules.

 

The new Directive covers areas of the current Capital Requirements Directive where EU provisions need to be transposed by Member States in a way suitable to their own environment, such as the requirements for access to the taking up and pursuit of the business of banks, the conditions for their exercise of the freedom of establishment and the freedom to provide services, and the definition of competent authorities and the principles governing prudential supervision.

New elements in this Directive are:

 

• Enhanced governance: The proposal strengthens the requirements with regard to corporate governance arrangements and processes and introduces new rules aimed at increasing the effectiveness of risk oversight by boards, improving the status of the risk management function and ensuring effective monitoring by supervisors of risk governance.

• Sanctions: If institutions breach EU requirements, the proposal will ensure that all supervisors can apply sanctions that are truly dissuasive, but also effective and proportionate - for example administrative fines of up to 10 per cent of an institution's annual turnover, or temporary bans on members of the institution's management body.

• Capital buffers: It introduces two capital buffers on top of the minimum capital requirements: a capital conservation buffer identical for all banks in the EU and a countercyclical capital buffer to be determined at national level.

• Enhanced supervision: The Commission proposes to reinforce the supervisory regime to require the annual preparation of a supervisory programme for each supervised institution on the basis of a risk assessment, greater and more systematic use of on-site supervisory examinations, more robust standards and more intrusive and forward-looking supervisory assessments.

 

Finally, the proposal will seek to reduce to the extent possible reliance by credit institutions on external credit ratings by: a) requiring that all banks' investment decisions are based not only on ratings but also on their own internal credit opinion, and b) that banks with a material number of exposures in a given portfolio develop internal ratings for that portfolio instead of relying on external ratings for the calculation of their capital requirements.

Press release