The present system of banking supervision in Europe essentially rests on three pillars: •  harmonisation of the regulations;  •  national regulatory competence; and  •  bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Bilateral cooperation is based on memoranda of understanding between the supervisory bodies. Added to this, at the multilateral level there is the Banking Supervision Committee at the ECB.
This committee is filled by senior representatives of the supervisory authorities and central banks of all the 15 EU member states and facilitates the exchange of information and cooperation both among the national supervisors themselves and with the ESCB. One main area of the BSC’s work consists of macro-prudential studies on the stability of the EU banking systems.