On 3 March 2020, the EBA published a speech by José Manuel Campa, EBA Chair, from the 4th Annual Conference on Fintech and Digital Innovation: Delivering the Future.
Various areas of digital finance including the EBA’s priorities for 2020 were discussed.
Mr Campa summarised the lessons learned from the recently completed deliverables under the Commissions’s 2018 Fintech Action Plan and Fintech Roadmap. These include:
- the identification of existing or absent regulation resulting in outcomes which are not technologically neutral.
- significant divergences in domestic requirements in conduct of business, cyber security , operational resilience and approaches to remote customer on-boarding means that firms struggle to scale up cross- border activities.
- divergences in Member States in terms of acceptability and regulation of the use of specific technologies.
- further regulation is needed in areas. The EBA have advised the European Commission (EC) to look at the establishment of an oversight framework for TPPs, for example, in the area of cloud services. They also believe crypto-assets requires additional regulation.
Looking forward, FinTech remains a strategic priority for the EBA. As does crypto-assets, AI, Big Data and machine learning, and wider innovation monitoring. The EBA will focus its attention in three key areas this year:
- RegTech: The EBA will be looking to assess how banking regulators and supervisors can leverage technology in its own processes. They will be stepping up the monitoring of RegTech solutions in the market to see how new technologies could be used by market participants to address regulatory and compliance requirements more effectively and efficiently, to identify any potential obstacles for the use of RegTech and to propose possible solutions and recommendations if needed.
- SupTech: The EBA will also be looking to enhance the sharing of use cases between competent authorities across the EU to facilitate a common approach to the use of technologies. For example, in suspicious transactions monitoring and regulatory reporting. They will also undertake a new thematic piece of work focusing on some of the structural changes it is starting to observe in the financial sector. These include the trend towards reaggregation of products and services on platforms, and emerging new forms of interconnection in the financial sector.
- Operational resilience: The EBA will be organising training events in 2020 in order to support the implementation of the guidelines on information and communication technology (ICT) risk and security management.
Mr Campa also reiterated that he expects further work as a follow up on the advice provided to the European Commission on ICT related legislative improvements. (e.g. the framework for oversight of TPPs), coherent cyber resilience testing framework, regulatory impediments to innovation, and crypto-assets. The EBA are also contributing to international efforts in this area.
The EBA also expects additional new mandates under the EC’s upcoming Digital Finance Strategy.