In february 2015, in a 18 page document called “The Union of Capital Markets: An Investor Perspective”, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink`s message was clear: the EU should assess the possibility of creating a cross-border personal pension fund. With a potential 240 million European citizens reached, the EU Commission, starting efforts for such a pan-european pension
The effects of the 2008 financial crisis were supported by European citizens in their double quality as depositors and taxpayers. The overhaul of the banking sector (see article here) put mechanisms for prudential oversight and crisis resolution in place. Just one piece of legislation remains to be added to the European Single Rulebook: the European
To achieve a fully-fledged Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the E.U. must complete the Banking Union (BU) based on a harmonised, risk-sharing banking services sector. The last step remaining is the establishment of a European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS, see here). A complete overhaul of the field is hard to obtain since a system resilient
In November 2015, the European Commission (EC) proposed a regulation for a common system within the Single Market to guarantee savings in case of a bank defaults. This system, the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), is meant to complement the common banking supervision mechanism and the centralised bank resolution authority and constitutes the third pillar
On 11 October, Sven Giegold (member of the European Parliament’s ECON Committee) reacted to the European Commission’s (EC) communication on the completion of the Banking Union (BU) in a Post on his blog. In particular, Giegold criticises the proposed interim steps to be taken in order to pass from the 1st to the 2nd phase
On the 29th of April, the Financial Times published an article on the varying quality of advice for European investors, found by the EC`s "Study on the distribution systems of retail investment products". Commenting on the grim picture painted by the study, BETTER FINANCE Managing Director Guillaume Prache stated that: "It is difficult for individual
Valdis Dombrovskis, vice president of the European Commission, is to launch an official investigation of long-term retail investment and pension products. In a speech marking a year since the publication of the Capital Markets Union action plan, Dombrovskis said creating a competitive single market for European consumer finance services remained a priority. As a result,
Guillaume Prache’s key focus as Managing Director of BETTER FINANCE has been to campaign against fund managers charging fees in line with active management, while, in reality, mimicking low-cost passive strategies, often called closet indexing. Prache said that “in today’s low-return environment, the high fees of falsely active funds show up more vividly. Since the
Following Monday’s vote by the parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON), PensionsEurope praised MEPs in pushing for a “practicable, proportionate and less prescriptive proposal” compared with that tabled by the Commission in 2014. PensionsEurope welcomed a “simplification” of the universal Pension Benefit Statement (PBS), which consumer group BETTER FINANCE had previously warned against. Indeed
Juan Manuel Viver, Policy Officer at BETTER FINANCE, was quoted in Ignites Europe – the Financial Times’ supplement covering the funds industry – on the call for a cap on the number of fund board directorships held by some Irish industry professionals. The call by a senior EU financial consumer advocate comes following a study carried out by the Irish fund industry regulator which showed that 13 individuals held