We should also enlist outside specialists – external auditors – for a quantitative assessment. Not only in order to restore market participants’ confidence in the European banking industry, but also to minimise reputational risk for the ECB. All supervisors in Europe are familiar with ad hoc examinations. These are precisely the instruments we should be using here.
This is the only way we can avert the suspicion of national supervisors taking too much account of national special circumstances. My other remark follows on directly: it concerns the legacy risks of banks supervised under the SSM. As these risks were created in the past, under the responsibility of individual member states, they should be borne in a national context, too. 6.