*  *  *  In her opening remarks, Anneli Tuominen, Director General of the FSA, touched upon a number of important questions concerning the costs and benefits of the banking union to the supervised banks themselves. I would like to follow up on this by asking how is the banking union beneficial from a central banking perspective?
In the euro area, the connection between the new supervisory mechanism and central banking is evident from the institutional set-up. The common Euroarea banking supervision, the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) has been attached to the ECB, which will in November 2014 assume new supervisory powers.