2nd Edition / June 2019

We are pleased to present the second edition of EBI Insights!

ACTIVITIES' UPDATE

EBI workstreams and task forces’ activities have started to flourish with a number of actions in the implementation phase and many other actions in the planning phase.

The Financial Resolution Task Force endeavours towards increasing the material at the disposal of researchers and stakeholders interested in this area. A list of priority topics, elaborated jointly by academics, regulators and practitioners, is now available on the EBI website with the hope that it will inspire future academic research. The inventory has also been enriched with a comprehensive list of academic publications which will be fuelled along the way in order to share the state-of-the-art academic research (both published and to come) in this area.

The Task Force on Corporate Governance has been active in setting up an inventory of the publications/reports/studies which exist in this area and may be used as references for the upcoming researches. A “priority list of topics” that matter to all stakeholders has also been established and will also hopefully inspire upcoming research; this list can be accessed on the EBI’s website under the related section. The announced Working Paper is being ironed out and will be subject to discussion amongst the Task Force Members prior to its presentation later this year.

As far as the announced workstream on CCPs/FMIs is concerned, a working programme has been established around the following pillars: financial market infrastructures, their resolution and alternative infrastructures (including new technologies such as blockchain). This workstream will be developed in the up-coming months under the co-leadership of Pr. Lehmann and Pr. Haentjens, and its academic outcome will fuel the current debate and developments in this field.

Building up on the already numerous academic activities from EBI’s members in the area of FinTech, a Task Force has been set up under the leadership of Pr. Zetzsche and Pr. Enriques. As a first step, an inventory of the already existing publications is being made which will pave the way for further research in this sector.

As a kick-off of the Sustainable Finance workstream, its academic co-leaders, Pr. Busch and Pr. Ferrarini have been taken up responsibility for organising the second day of the next EBI Global Annual Conference, which will be devoted to this topic.

The Task Force on Financial Supervisory Architecture (academic leader: Pr Luis Morais) is currently preparing a preliminary program and should disseminate soon specific pillars on which contributions or active scientific involvement from academics and relevant stakeholders would be welcome. A significant moment for the brainstorming underlying the preparation of such program will be the International Conference jointly organized by CIRSF-Research Centre on Regulation and Supervision of the Financial Sector (www.cirsf.eu) and EBI in Lisbon, on the 4 th July, under the coordination of Pr Luis Morais (Program available at EBI website as well as it will happen soon with presentations and papers to be delivered at the Conference), in which the relevance of various alternative designs for the Financial Supervisory Architecture, either at EU level or national level of EU Member States, for overall financial stability more than ten years after the big financial crisis, will be addressed by several Speakers (with contributions that should originate papers relevant for the future work-stream of this Task Force).

As regards national reforms that could provide a benchmark, or food for thought for future reforms, at EU level, of the models of financial supervision ensuring an holistic vision of this supervision, attention should be paid, e.g. to the Project for reform of financial supervision currently pending at the Portuguese Parliament, although it is not certain at this stage, with Parliamentary elections that should take place in October 2019, if Parliament will be able to approve such reform. The topic will however remain very much on the table and will be certainly covered by the Task Force on Financial Supervisory Architecture, as well as prospective EU developments in the wake of a rather limited (content-wide) ESAs reform.

EVENTS

IN THE PIPELINE

30-31 Jan 2020, Tübingen:

International conference on FMI regulation, trading and post trading

20-21 Feb 2020, Frankfurt:

EBI Global Annual Conference

Spring 2020, Athens, Law School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, on the occasion of the launch of the LLM Program in Financial Regulation:

Liability of supervisory and resolution authorities

Q4 2020, Genoa:

Sustainable finance

BRIE-FIN

Please note the recent launch of EBI's Brie-Fin, which presents in-depth thoughts from academia and other stakeholders in banking regulation. Download Brie-Fin 1st Edition March 2019

CONTACT

European Banking Institute

c/o TechQuartier (POLLUX)

Platz der Einheit 2

60327 Frankfurt am Main

Germany

Tel.: +49 (0) 69 7500 3904

E-Mail: news@ebi-europa.eu

Website: www.ebi-europa.eu

Photo by André Vieira, CC BY-SA 4.0

BANCO DE PORTUGAL PRESENTS ITS LEGAL RESEARCH AGENDA

Pedro Machado, Chief Legal Counsel of Banco de Portugal and member of EBI’s Advisory Board, presents to us the newly set up Legal Research Agenda of Banco de Portugal.

“This Legal Research Agenda has four main components:

  • The launch of a new and regular publication in the form of “Legal Carnets” where the lawyers of Banco de Portugal (and eventually staff with other academic background) as well as external researchers will be eligible to publish their research papers following review by a Scientific Board;

  • The organisation of conferences (one being the Annual Conference organised at the end of the year), workshops and seminars, also based on the advice given by the Scientific Board;

  • The conclusion of protocols with highly regarded national and international academic/policy-driven research institutes;

  • The participation of experts of the Banco de Portugal in conferences in order to spread and widely communicate the know-how of Banco de Portugal to Portuguese society and EU counterparts.

Content-wise, three main areas have been identified: i) Monetary policy and financial stability; ii) Economic growth in the Euro area; iii) The future of institutions and public policies in Portugal and the EU, with a first study conducted on ‘The institutional reform of the euro area’.

On this basis, the collaboration with EBI will be multi-dimensional through events and research anchored into a soon-to-come protocol.

Pedro Machado concludes: “Banco de Portugal is proud to announce this Legal Research Agenda which aims to enlarge the traditional scope of the central banks’ research through a horizontal approach, so as to make it more meaningful for the daily life of citizens. Mindful that economics is certainly the foundation of the central bank’s research, we henceforth have the ambition to expand to the legal domain while being open to engage in multi-disciplinary works combining both law and economics. We also expect dealings with more grounded topics such as instant transfers in the area of payments or digital currencies. We hope that this will contribute to close the gap between the central bank and the citizens which it services.”

Photo by Jacob J., CC BY-SA 4.0

REFRESHING WIND FROM POLAND

Interview with Pr. Dariusz Adamski from new joiner Wroclaw University

What makes your university specific in particular from the perspective of its position as an Eastern European institution?

Wrocław, the Polish town where my Centre for European Economic Law and Governance (CEELG) is located, has been one of the most buoyant locations in Central and Eastern Europe since the “big-bang” accession to the EU fifteen years ago. There are a number of reasons for this. First, it is conveniently located, with equal distance to Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Vienna, especially now with modern transport infrastructure. This advantage has been amplified by the openness and internationalisation encapsulated in “Wrocław – the meeting place” motto, which has now largely become a part of the common conscience. The fact that it is a university town, with more than one hundred thousand students among a population estimated at about 700,000, it has also been an asset in the eyes of investors, some of which (including Credit Suisse and BNY Mellon) come from the banking sector.

The CEELG is affiliated to the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics of the University of Wrocław. The university is one of the main universities in Poland and the faculty – ranking among the top Polish institutions in scientific excellence – is the only one in Poland which combines both law and economics.

Building on all these locational and institutional advantages, the CEELG was created in early 2017 with the goal of building bridges: between the more mature Western centres and our Eastern European colleagues, between academia and practice, between law and other disciplines. I believe you need such an approach to properly understand the trajectory of the financial markets’ evolution. To me personally, this trajectory is very much like the recent history of my town – expanding and changing at a breath-taking pace throughout the last three decades, yet also forcing one to wonder whether this pace, and the model it represents, is sustainable in the long term and how to mitigate the fallout effects of this speedy metamorphosis.

Why did you choose to join the EBI and which areas of cooperation would you favour in the future?

The fact that the financial markets are so globalised, complex and interdependent – and that quite certainly they will become only more so in the future – makes me very confident that there is a tremendous demand for institutions like EBI. EBI has all the assets necessary to become number one in the field globally in a short time span. Frankfurt places you where many of the key stakeholders are located and you have become a very professionally managed association very quickly. There is a vision behind the Institute and you have the right means to make it come true. I’m happy to witness the process as an insider.

My personal interests have gravitated towards the relationship between central banking and the economic, political and social setups which monetary policy is intended to improve. Going far beyond the question of the central banks’ independence, it builds on the lesson which policymakers have, all too often, failed to assimilate – that a suitable monetary regime can greatly facilitate economic growth and social resilience of the political and legal systems, while a suboptimal one, can trigger high unemployment, depress productivity, cause massive emigration and political unrest, etc. Another salient, and under-researched, area of the CEELG’s interests is what I call an informal banking union – the pattern represented in various Eastern European countries heavily exposed to the banking systems of the Western countries. Such a setup limits the economic benefits the local societies can accrue from banking in good economic times, as these benefits partly flow abroad in dividends. But it has powerful shock absorption capacities during a crisis.

These are just two examples of the research strands pursued in Wrocław. I hope the CEELG can contribute to further research on these topics as a member of the EBI, along with the other research themes, like the adjustment of prudential requirements to the specific circumstances of different kinds of financial institutions.

Topics-wise, as far as the Banking Union’s developments are concerned, are you studying closely the SSM and its impact on non-SSM countries?

I’ve always been in favour of very far-reaching European integration. But I have no doubts that monetary integration should be one of the last – not the first – parts of the process. By making the single currency a political goal to be achieved and defended at whatever cost, European policymakers have been making a fateful mistake, I’m afraid (last year I published a book with the CUP to explain the point more broadly).

It is yet to be seen how the mistake will be corrected, but neither the SSM nor the SRM might be in a position to remedy this crucial flaw, as they are the top layers on the underlying markets which are very fragmented and disintegrated in the Eurozone. These institutional innovations might not be in a position to correct the problem of very low profit opportunities, and huge risks, to which, in particular, the banking sectors of the Mediterranean countries of the Eurozone are exposed. For the very same reasons, unfortunately, the Capital Markets Union might not usher in any actual union, in the sense of a meaningful diversification of investment portfolios and productive allocation of capital throughout the EU.

The huge practical constraints which the concept of the CMU has encountered are very regrettable for the Eastern part of the EU. But the dilemmas that an actual banking union entails are much less relevant, especially in the countries, like Poland, outside the single currency. Profit opportunities for the banking sector are still there. Foreign investors know it and want to take advantage of these opportunities, supporting the informal banking union I mentioned earlier.

Certainly, there are also various broader corporate governance problems in the region, affecting the banking sector even where – as in Poland – money laundering is not a major issue. In this respect, the SSM as an alternative to the purely national prudential supervision could offer improvements also for the countries outside the Eurozone. But it has less to offer as a countermeasure for the re-nationalisation trend in the financial sector, for which Poland is a good example, and for the excessively close ties between the banking sector and politicians which this trend entails. Plus, the governments of the countries like Poland know that their taxpayers will not foot the bill for whatever the ultimate cost of restructuring the Italian or the Greek banking systems might prove to be, as long as they stay outside the banking union. But once you join the SSM, you just don’t know what role the Eurosystem or national treasuries may finally be forced to assume. Essentially, you only know that the current arrangement is incomplete and probably unsustainable in the longer term.

NEW ON EBI’s WEBSITE

A new section has been created on Task Forces/Workstreams under ‘Projects’. Here you can find the Task Forces/Workstreams’ Terms of Reference which present their respective mission and ambition. Further to this, a List of Topics has been elaborated as the result of the collaboration between academics, regulators and practitioners with the hope that it will inspire further academic research on crucial topics. Academic publications have also been assembled and Seminars and Events in this area are listed with their related documentation.

Another new section under "Publications" has been created in order to easily access the EBI Newsletters, i.e. EBI Insights (which is meant as an informative publication) and EBI Brie-Fin (which presents in-depth views from the academia, regulators and practitioners on a pre-defined topic). Both Newsletter appear quarterly.

In order to foster the communication in particular about the Events, a Vimeo channel has been open for you in order to share for instance webcast of Conferences – happy to receive any material to be posted!

More will come in the Fall in order to enlarge EBI’s internal and external communication!

European Banking Institute e.V.

c/o TechQuartier (POLLUX)

Platz der Einheit 2

60327 Frankfurt am Main

Germany

E-mail: caroline.gourisse@ebi-europa.eu

E-mail: claudia.collins@ebi-europa.eu

Tel.: +49 173 889 887

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