European Banking Union A : The Single Supervisory Mechanism

At the peak of the Global Financial Crisis in fall 2008, each of the 27 member states in the European Union (EU) set many of its own banking rules and had its own bank regulators and supervisors. The crisis made the shortcomings of this decentralized approach obvious, and since its formation in January 2011, the European Banking Authority (EBA) has been developing a “Single Rulebook” that will harmonize banking rules across the EU countries. In June 2012, European leaders went even further, committing to a banking union that would better coordinate supervision of banks in the then 18-country Eurozone. A key component of the banking union was the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), which brought banks in the Eurozone under supervision of the European Central Bank (ECB), with day-to-day assistance from existing national authorities. This case reviews the changes in Eurozone bank regulation and supervision resulting from the Single Supervisory Mechanism