EFR Letter to ECOFIN President Fischer

18 June 2009

The European Financial Services Round Table welcomes the recent progress made at the ECOFIN Council on 9 June on European financial supervision. It also gives some initial reactions ahead of the forthcoming European Summit.

The European Financial Services Round Table in its letter welcomes the recent progress made at the ECOFIN Council on 9 June on European financial supervision. It also offers some initial reactions ahead of the forthcoming European Summit.

Regarding the European Systemic Risk Board, the EFR supports establishing an independent macro-prudential entity to monitor and advise on financial and economic risks. The EFR also considers that in order to reach decisions efficiently the decision-making body of the Board should be streamlined and be ideally composed of small group of members, including the chairs of the European Supervisory Authorities, rather than by a delegation exceeding 60 members.
 
In addition, it will be crucial to install an effective consultation process with market participants and other interested stakeholders. A possible way of ensuring this could be establishing a technical advisory group, which would provide practitioners’ input before the Board takes decisions.
 
EFR fully supports the immediate establishment of the European System of Financial Supervision. The European Council should ask the Commission to provide a list of specific areas or specific criteria helping to define those areas.
 
The creation of a single rule book is also welcomed by EFR. However, it will be paramount to ensure that such a rulebook will be fully consistently implement and applied by supervisors by the establishment of supporting rules and regulations that duly recognises the importance of group-level management of operations as well as risk and capital. Moreover, the future of EU legislation and single-rule book should allow for an efficient and effective functioning of colleges and also clearly define the dividing line between the competences of ESA’s and day-to-day supervision carried out by the consolidated solo supervisors.
 
Finally, EFR highlighted the importance of defining the burden sharing. It will be critical to progress swiftly on this point with realistic proposals in order to equip Europe with an EU financial supervision framework.

© EFR - European Financial Services Round Table