The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the Eurozone, a monetary union of 19 EU member states which employ the euro. Established by the Treaty of Amsterdam, the ECB is one of the world's most important central banks and serves as one of seven institutions of the European Union, being enshrined in the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The bank's capital stock is owned by all 27 central banks of each EU member state. The current President of the ECB is Christine Lagarde. Headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, the bank formerly occupied the Eurotower prior to the construction of its new seat.
The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is an internationally agreed system of identifying bank accounts across national borders to facilitate the communication and processing of cross border transactions with a reduced risk of transcription errors. An IBAN uniquely identifies the account of a customer at a financial institution. It was originally adopted by the European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) and later as an international standard under ISO 13616:1997. The current standard is ISO 13616:2007, which indicates SWIFT as the formal registrar. Initially developed to facilitate payments within the European Union, it has been implemented by most European countries and numerous countries in other parts of the world, mainly in the Middle East and the Caribbean. As of May 2020, 77 countries were using the IBAN numbering system.
An open market operation (OMO) is an activity by a central bank to give liquidity in its currency to a bank or a group of banks. The central bank can either buy or sell government bonds in the open market or, in what is now mostly the preferred solution, enter into a repo or secured lending transaction with a commercial bank: the central bank gives the money as a deposit for a defined period and synchronously takes an eligible asset as collateral. A central bank uses OMO as the primary means of implementing monetary policy. The usual aim of open market operations is—aside from supplying commercial banks with liquidity and sometimes taking surplus liquidity from commercial banks—to manipulate the short-term interest rate and the supply of base money in an economy, and thus indirectly control the total money supply, in effect expanding money or contracting the money supply. This involves meeting the demand of base money at the target interest rate by buying and selling government securities, or other financial instruments. Monetary targets, such as inflation, interest rates, or exchange rates, are used to guide this implementation.
The Bank of France, headquartered in Paris, is the central bank of France. Founded in 1800, it began as a private institution for managing state debts and issuing notes. It is responsible for the accounts of the French government, managing the accounts and the facilitation of payments for the Treasury and some public companies. It also oversees the auctions of public securities on behalf of the European Central Bank.
The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) is a committee of the European Parliament which is responsible for the regulation of financial services, the free movement of capital and payments, taxation and competition policies, oversight of the European Central Bank, and the international financial system.
Romania’s current national currency is the leu. However, being bound by its EU accession agreement, Romania has to replace the leu with the euro, as soon as Romania will fulfil all of the four nominal euro convergence criteria as states in the Treaty of Functioning the European Union in article 140. At the moment, the only currency on the market is leu, euro is not yet used in shops. The Romanian leu is not part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, although the Romanian authorities are working to prepare the changeover to the euro. In order to achieve the change of the currency, Romania is required to undergo at least two years of sustainable stability within the limits of the convergence criteria. The current Romanian Government in addition established a self-imposed criterion to reach a certain level of real convergence, as a steering anchor to decide the appropriate target year for ERM II membership and euro adoption. As of March 2018, the scheduled date for euro adoption in Romania is 2024, according to the National Plan to Changeover to the Euro.
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi is an Italian economist who is currently Chairman of Société Générale, a French multinational banking and financial services company.
CIB Bank is the second-biggest commercial bank in Hungary, after the 1 January 2008 merger with Inter-Európa Bank. This follows the 2007 merger of their respective Italian parent companies, Banca Intesa and Sanpaolo IMI to form Intesa Sanpaolo.
Yves Mersch is a Luxembourgish jurist and lawyer who served as Governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg from the bank's formation in 1998 until 2012 and as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank since 2012.
The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is an umbrella term for the group of policies aimed at converging the economies of member states of the European Union at three stages. The policies cover the 19 eurozone states, as well as non-euro European Union states.
The German Banking Industry Committee (GBIC), previously known as the Central Credit Committee is an industry association of the German banking industry. Its decisions are held normative for the national banking sector – either directly by interbank treaties or indirectly by preparing a corresponding ministerial or Bundesbank decision.
The European Systemic Risk Board was established on 16 December 2010 in response to the ongoing financial crisis. It is tasked with the macro-prudential oversight of the financial system within the European Union in order to contribute to the prevention or mitigation of systemic risks to financial stability in the EU. It shall contribute to the smooth functioning of the internal market and thereby ensure a sustainable contribution of the financial sector to economic growth.
A European Union-wide banking stress test exercise has been conducted by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors every year since 2009. The second instance was performed in July 2010. The Council of the European Union mandated that Committee so to do, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis which started in 2007.
Andrea Enria an Italian economist who currently serves as Chair of the European Central Bank's Supervisory Board, as of 1 January 2019. He previously served as the chairperson of the European Banking Authority (EBA) between 2011 and 2019.
Benoît Georges Cœuré is a French economist who served on the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) from 2011 until 2019.
The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) is the legislative and institutional framework that grants the European Central Bank (ECB) sole licensing authority over all banks in participating EU member states and makes it the prudential supervisor of these banks, directly for the larger ones and indirectly for the smaller. Eurozone countries are required to participate, while participation is voluntary for non-eurozone EU member states. As of late 2018, none of the non-eurozone member states had joined, although the ECB reported that some of them had expressed an interest. The SSM has been the first-established and remains the central component of the European banking union, and works in conjunction to the Single Resolution Mechanism.
Strong customer authentication (SCA) is a requirement of the EU Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) on payment service providers within the European Economic Area. The requirement ensures that electronic payments are performed with multi-factor authentication, to increase the security of electronic payments. Physical card transactions already commonly have what could be termed strong customer authentication in the EU, but this has not generally been true for Internet transactions across the EU prior to the implementation of the requirement, and many contactless card payments do not use a second authentication factor.
Sabine Lautenschläger is a German jurist who previously served as a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank. She was formerly vice-president of the Deutsche Bundesbank. Lautenschläger graduated with a Staatsexamen from the University of Bonn in 1990.
The banking union of the European Union is the transfer of responsibility for banking policy from the national to the EU level in several countries of the European Union, initiated in 2012 as a response to the Eurozone crisis. The motivation for banking union was the fragility of numerous banks in the Eurozone, and the identification of vicious circle between credit conditions for these banks and the sovereign credit of their respective home countries. In several countries, private debts arising from a property bubble were transferred to sovereign debt as a result of banking system bailouts and government responses to slowing economies post-bubble. Conversely, weakness in sovereign credit resulted in deterioration of the balance sheet position of the banking sector, not least because of high domestic sovereign exposures of the banks.
