The European Central Bank (ECB) has successfully introduced interaction on Fit and Proper testing with significant institutions and their advisors via a dedicated infrastructure called IMAS Portal. Two new procedure types will be onboarded in the coming months to the ECB’s IMAS Portal, i.e. passporting notifications and qualifying holding procedures. They will be onboarded end of (i.e. 27) September 2021. Passporting notifications and applications with regard to qualifying holdings will therefore need to be submitted via the IMAS portal as of 1 January 2022. This relates to passporting notifications by and qualifying holdings in Dutch banks. Hence, significant and less significant Dutch banks.
After this date it will no longer be possible that said notifications and applications are submitted via the Digital Supervision Portal (Digitaal Loket Toezicht) of De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). Please note that any application for a declaration of no-objection in relation to Section 3:96(1) of the Dutch Financial Supervision Act, still needs to be submitted via DNB’s Digital Supervision Portal after 1 January 2022.
Information Management System for the Single Supervisory Mechanism
The ECB Identity Portal, which is the online platform for the central identification, authentication and account management of users will serve as authentication tool for existing and new users of the IMAS Portal.
The purpose of this letter is to inform you about the forthcoming procedure to submit notifications and applications through the IMAS Portal. This letter is also to remind you about the onboarding to the ECB Identity Portal and the ECB applications where a bank in the SSM area is not onboarded yet. If such bank is part of a supervised group, the onboarding is carried out for the whole group via the parent credit institution or the (mixed) financial holding company.
Account management and roles
In case you would like to add additional users for any new procedures the existing path would need to be followed. Account management for the ECB applications is self-managed by institutions via the ECB Identity Portal in accordance with the following roles:
- Delegated User Administrators (DUAs) can create, edit and delete users for the entire organisation.
- Delegated Access Administrators (DAAs), for one or more applications, can:
- grant and revoke access to one or more ECB applications;
- manage application-level user rights (where applicable).
- User: an authenticated and authorised natural person, who, on behalf of a third party, is assigned access rights to an ECB application. User rights are granted for each ECB application.
Multiple roles can be granted to a single person to accommodate different working models and practices.
The new procedures in the IMAS portal
The ECB and the national competent authorities (NCA’s) will launch passporting procedures and qualifying holding procedures for use in the IMAS portal end of (i.e. 27) September 2021. The onboarding of these two procedures forms part of the ECB’s and NCAs’ commitment to enhance digitalisation and increase communication and transparency during supervisory processes.
All (less) significant banks/groups are encouraged to use the IMAS Portal also for notification of passporting and qualifying holdings. The use of the IMAS Portal does not change the legal environment under which the ECB and NCA’s interact with supervised institutions and does not change in any way the allocation of legal responsibilities between NCA’s and the ECB. As we move forward, other supervisory processes will be included in the portal (e.g. licensing applications and withdrawal procedures).
More information on the IMAS Portal as well as the newly onboarded passporting and qualifying holding procedures is available in the Q&A (listed below this announcement), the ECB and DNB websites, and in the Portal itself. Please visit the ECB’s banking supervision website for the terms of use for the IMAS Portal, an overview to help you get started, and useful information on how the Portal is used.
Registration
In case you would like to register additional users in the ECB Identity Portal and be assigned the DUA role for the ECB applications (this includes besides the IMAS portal also STAR and ASTRA) and/or the DAA role for the applications that support this role (IMAS portal and STAR), please get in touch with your ECB contact person or contact the ECB support at SSMSecretariat@ecb.europa.eu. Please note that the time taken to process the registration may vary. We hope that these additional procedures added to the ECB applications will support efficient supervisory processes.
Source: De Nederlandse Bank
