Second, we should examine barriers that individual consumers may face. For example, a Federal Reserve analysis of the SCF suggests that the primary reason individuals do not have a transaction account is a simple lack of trust in financial institutions.10 This may originate from negative personal experiences with financial institutions since more than half of the unbanked previously held checking accounts.
And while, as I have said, we are still in the process of fine-tuning and gradually implementing the new framework we have built, we have to grapple with very specific challenges. In Europe, the markets have already put the new regulatory and supervisory architecture to the test.