European financial institutions might try exploiting loopholes as well as differences in national rules for the purpose of getting looser regulation or evading ECB rules altogether, especially after the United Kingdom quits the EU, as two ECB regulators told on Friday.
Daniele Nouy and Sabine Lautenschlaeger renewed their calls for closing gaps in EU rules, which put investment companies and bank branches outside the European bloc’s banking supervision.
Fewer than 10 of 40 financial institutions, doing business in the European Union from London have already applied for an ECB license just to keep operating in the EU after the UK leaves, as Reuters informed the previous week. Instead, other banks are considering setting up market units, supervised by national authorities.
Delivering a speech earlier in Helsinki, the head of the ECB’s supervisory arm, Nouy had told that financial institutions might be shifting their operations to countries with less strict regulation or simply moving activities into the shadow banking sector.
