In the last four years, banking supervision in Europe has been involved in a radical evolutionary process; the aim of which is to overcome the harmonized national supervision model on which European legislation had previously been based and to achieve a real banking union, with fully integrated supranational banking supervision.
The paper offers a snapshot of the evolutionary process under way, focusing on five regulatory corpuses, of which only two, that providing for the European System for Financial Supervision and the so-called CRD IV Package, are currently in force.
A key factor in the reform is the two-speed approach, which has distinguished European law since the adoption of the single currency and led to the architecture of the new system of supervision being described as two concentric circles, with the outer circle for regulatory innovations applicable in all the member states, and the inner circle for "special" regulations, applicable only in the euro-area countries and any others that apply them spontaneously.
The first group includes the regulations providing for the European System for Financial Supervision, the CRR regulation, the CRD IV Directive and the two proposed directives on crisis resolution and deposit insurance schemes, while the second includes the two proposed regulations on the Single Supervisory Mechanism and the Single Resolution Mechanism together with the Single Bank Resolution Fund, which will be the most advanced stage of the overall European banking union project.
The paper looks at the proposed Single Supervisory Mechanism regulation, approved by the COREPER of the European Council on 18 April 2013, and at the revised version of 1 July, giving a preliminary analysis of the future distribution of competences between the ECB and the competent national authorities, a description of the relationships between the ECB and the European Banking Authority, and an assessment of the overall solidity of the reform and of its effects on the Italian legal system.
