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18 de abril de 2024Internal market commissioner says harmonisation is necessary to guarantee consumer confidence.
The European Commission proposed today (12 July) to harmonise schemes that member states have in place to guarantee bank deposits.
It said that the step was essential to prevent any repeat of the havoc caused by a lack of co-ordination between different schemes in the autumn of 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
A decision by Ireland at that time to provide an unlimited guarantee to each bank-account holder threatened the stability of the EU’s banking system, as depositors withdrew money from domestic banks and moved funds to Irish banks because of the higher level of protection. The Irish move triggered an emergency meeting of the eurozone’s heads of state and government.
‘Necessary proposals’
“I believe that these proposals are necessary in order to guarantee consumer confidence,” Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market, said today.
The Commission is proposing to extend existing EU legislation that obliges all member states to have a scheme in place to guarantee deposits in the event that a bank becomes insolvent. This legislation has been in place since 1994, but was rapidly amended in March 2009.
The current legislation requires the schemes to protect all deposits up to €50,000, with this limit set to rise to €100,000 at the end of 2010. The limit is calculated based on all the different accounts that a person has at a particular bank.
The Commission is proposing to set a minimum EU-wide limit for how much money banks must contribute to the schemes. It wants national banking industries to make an upfront contribution to the scheme that is equivalent to 1.5% of eligible deposits in the country where they are based. This money would be held by the authorities managing the scheme, in case any bank gets into difficulties.
The Commission is also proposing that banks could be called on to provide a further 0.5% of eligible deposits, if the funds held by the authorities are insufficient. As a last resort, national schemes would be able to provide funds to each other.
Opposition
The proposal is expected to meet resistance from the banking sector, which has repeatedly warned that various financial reforms under development at EU level will overburden it with costs. The European Banking Federation said in a report last month that the cumulative impact of planned reforms would force its members to reduce their lending to small businesses and households.
“We know that this is an additional effort that is being required of the banks on top of many other demands placed on them of late,” Barnier said.
He said that the Commission had taken this into account by proposing that banks could have until December 2020 to provide their upfront contributions.
The Commission is also proposing that the deadline for schemes to pay out to depositors should be reduced to one week, compared to 20 working days under the current legislation.
Governments last year refused to reduce the deadline beyond 20 working days, despite pressure to do so from the Commission. The Commission said, however, that the US already applies a seven-day deadline and the UK plans to implement one, in a bit too prove that it is a realistic limit.
Deposit-guarantee schemes
Another aspect of the Commission’s proposal is that, for the first time, governments would be obliged to ensure that all savers (with the exception of financial institutions and public sector bodies) are covered by deposit-guarantee schemes. Currently, coverage is not systematic, with exceptions applied to certain kinds of banks (notably savings banks in Germany and Austria).
The idea of mandatory coverage has been opposed by Germany, which earlier this year said that it would resist any attempt to change its current arrangements. German and Austrian savings banks have also expressed concerns that the requirement could spell the end for their system of “mutual guarantees”, which protect banks from default but do not, technically, protect individual depositors. Barnier denied that this was the case.