With government pensions on the decline, and occupational ones covering only a minority of citizens and pension needs, all Public Authorities are asking EU citizens to save more and earlier for retirement. They are, surprisingly, omitting another crucial requisite for pension adequacy: decent net real (i.e. after inflation) returns. Compounded returns are the main –
BETTER FINANCE welcomes the initiative from the European Commission on its consultation on FinTech. Our organization believes that indeed Fintech could make financial services more effective, more competitive and easier to use, and therefore benefit savers, individual investors and other financial services users. We write “could” as there are conditions for Fintech developments to translate
BETTER FINANCE supports initiatives and policies that will restore equities to their rightful place, whilst simultaneously help reduce the costs charged by intermediaries who stand between the investor and the companies operating in the real economy.
Robo- and Cyborg-Investing is still an emerging trend, but one that is growing and evolving rapidly. BETTER FINANCE believes that it can lead to significant benefits for EU citizens as savers and individual investors, and therefore to the real EU economy as a whole, in bad need of a more direct and stronger link between
Azione MPS, the Association of Small Individual Shareholders and member of CONAPA, sent out a letter today addressed to the Public Authorities of the European Union and of the Italian Republic. The letter points to the main contradictions at the heart of the forced state intervention in the listed company Banca Monte dei Paschi di
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR ALL SHAREHOLDERS OF BANCO POPULAR: protect your investment in Banco Popular…
With up to 20 expert members taking part in the four stakeholder groups of the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs), including 3 vice-chairs, BETTER FINANCE is the user-side NGO that is most actively involved with the work of the ESAs. It is therefore particularly well placed to contribute in the work of this crucial and welcome
BETTER FINANCE has been and is the most involved user-side NGO with the ESAs’ work, with up to 20 expert members in the ESAs stakeholder groups, vice chairing three of them (EBA, ESMA and EIOPA Insurance) and having chaired the first ESMA one. It is happy to share this six-year experience with regard to the
This paper tries to assess the regulatory and, more importantly, the supervisory (public enforcement) developments regarding the actual protection of savers, individual investors and mortgage borrowers since the 2008 financial crisis, in particular regarding the mis-selling of savings, investment and mortgage products.
A PRIIPs Regulation that contradicts or fails to take into account disclosure requirements in other Directives and Regulations will simply add confusion for all stakeholders involved and significantly undermines investor protection. To bring these important issues to the attention the authorities, BETTER FINANCE wrote a letter to the European Commission’s Directorate General for financial stability,