The view that the prerequisite for all this was the creation of a single supervisor was immediately put forward, because this would have helped eliminate the mutual distrust, and so it had to be the starting point.
The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) was set up in a record time: it was made up of the European Central Bank and the national supervisory authorities, and became operational in November 2014. Such rapid implementation was possible thanks to a provision in the Treaty expressly assigning the ECB prudential supervision functions.