My presence here today is also a simple gesture to render my homage to his memory as a great contributor to the European ideal. I would like to focus my remarks on the underlying reasons for the decision to set-up a Single Supervisory Mechanism as a major step towards a European Banking Union that was taken at the European Summit in June 2012.
What is the meaning of a Banking Union? In my view it involves a transfer to the European level of the regulatory and institutional framework responsible for safeguarding the robustness and stability of the banking sector. The first pillar is regulation.