Finalising Banking Union, completing the Capital Markets Union (CMU) and meeting the new challenges of financial technology ('FinTech') and 'sustainable finance' are the priorities of the European Commission, reiterated Valdis Dombrovskis, the Commissioner for Financial Services, answering questions from the MEPs of the committee on economic and monetary affairs (ECON) of the Parliament on Tuesday 21 November.
During this dialogue, the MEPs referred to a number of legislative proposals, expressing a range of concerns. UK MEP Kay Swinburne (ECR) expressed misgivings concerning inconsistencies with the financial stability objective in legislation recently adopted, for instance the rules to label securitised products 'simple, transparent and standardised' (STS).
The Greens/EFA group is still worried about banks that are 'too big to fail', Spanish MEP Ernest Urtasun reported. “Can you promise the European citizen that taxpayers' money is no longer going to be used to bail out banks”, he asked the Commissioner.
We have a number of resources available to us to tackle the problem, was Dombrovskis' firm response, referring to the proposed reform of the banking structure presented in 2014 and recently withdrawn by the Commission (see EUROPE 11891). The proposal remained a deadlock at the Parliament due to an absence of agreement between the political groups, which finally led to its being rejected in the ECON committee, the Commissioner said pointedly. The Commission therefore decided to move forward by way of other initiatives, for instance by reinforcing the prudential requirements, he explained.
Jonás Fernández (S&D, Spain) questioned the Commissioner about the creation of the European Deposit Insurance System (EDIS). Reiterating his group's concerns since the Commission published its communication in October (see EUROPE 11881), the MEP said that the new proposals had completely changed the initial proposal.
“The Commission has been trying to make discussions between co-legislators easier as, let's be honest, we've seen no progress on this dossier since 2015”, Dombrovskis replied. The Commission has proposed new elements aiming to roll the system out more gradually, without watering down its ambition for a complete pooling of deposit systems at European level, he went on to stress. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)