The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has fined Danske Bank, Nordea Bank, SEB, Svenska Handelsbanken and Swedbank €495,000 each and issued five public notices for negligently breaching the Credit Rating Agencies Regulation (CRAR). ESMA found that the five banks infringed the CRAR by issuing credit ratings without being authorised by ESMA to do so.
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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published its Annual Report and Accounts, which looks back on the key pieces of work undertaken by the organisation throughout 2017/18.  FCA’s Chair Charles Forward: “Financial services affect the lives of everyone. And, as this Annual Report shows, keeping pace with the depth and breadth of developments in financial services can be a challenging balancing act. We must act swiftly and decisively to tackle harm to consumers,  particularly the most vulnerable. In the process, we have to make some difficult choices, learn from what works and what doesn’t – and be open about both.”
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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision released the Global systemically important banks: revised assessment methodology and the higher loss absorbency requirement. When the Basel Committee first published the global systemically important bank (G-SIB) framework in 2011, it agreed to review the framework every three years to allow for the opportunity to enhance the framework, as needed.

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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has outlined the measures it will take to protect consumers and sets out when and how the organisation takes action.  The Approach to Consumers document sits alongside a new discussion paper on a Duty of Care and taken together are intended to ensure there are no gaps in protection for consumers in the financial sector.
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 The European Banking Authority (EBA) published the final peer review Report on the Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on the information to be notified when exercising the right of establishment and the freedom to provide services for credit institutions. The Report, which summarises the main findings of the peer review exercise, showed that competent authorities have developed consistent and robust procedures to comply with the RTS requirements although the level of sophistication of these processes varies across Member States. The EBA has, therefore, identified some best practices, which might be beneficial to address some of the identified weaknesses.
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Speech by Mr Fernando Restoy*, Chairman, Financial Stability Institute, Bank for International Settlements, about building a resilient UK financial sector – next steps for prudential regulation, structural reform and mitigating risks: ‘I think that there is a general sense that the post-crisis regulatory reforms have already made substantial progress in meeting their objectives. While it would be a mistake to claim “mission accomplished”, the time has certainly come to shift the emphasis from standard setting to ensuring an effective implementation of the agreed reforms.’
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The euro area’s economy continues on a growth path and inflation is gradually returning towards our objective, says Mario Draghy, President of the European Central Bank, during his speech. “But uncertainty permeates the economic outlook. Recent data releases have created questions about the durability of the growth outlook. And – as we will discuss over the next two days – the crisis has presented us with new issues and fresh challenges in understanding the wage- and price-setting process.”
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The Bank of England, Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have published a joint discussion paper (DP) on an approach to improve the operational resilience of firms and financial market infrastructures (FMI’s). It envisages that boards and senior management can achieve better standards of operational resilience through increased focus on setting, monitoring and testing specific impact tolerances for key business services, which define the amount of disruption that could be tolerated.
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We present a euro area central stabilisation scheme that is relatively free from adverse incentives (moral hazard), because transfer payments to Member States are based on changes in world trade in the various economic sectors. Indeed, these changes are largely driven by external forces and therefore not directly controlled by individual governments or countries. The transfers generated by our scheme tend to be temporary, countercyclical and larger when economies are less diversified. Finally, the scheme is quite robust to revisions in the underlying export data.

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The European Banking Authority (EBA) issued a Recommendation addressed to the Maltese Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) after establishing it had breached Union law in relation to its supervision of Pilatus Bank. The EBA Recommendation aims at remedying the particular failings identified by the EBA by encouraging the FIAU to take all the necessary actions to comply with the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Terrorism Financing Directive (AML/CTF). Continue reading…