Further, since the start of 2013 liquidity conditions at Spanish banks have improved, and there has been a re-balancing of their funding sources. This is the outcome of the diminished tensions on the sovereign debt markets and of improved confidence, along with the lesser fragmentation of euro area money and capital markets. In this respect, retail deposits, which fell, especially in the summer months of 2012, have since been faring better. Since early 2013, they have been posting positive rates of change. The pick-up in deposits has seen the retail funding gap – i.e. the percentage of credit that banks cannot cover with deposits – narrow. That allows them to reduce the need to resort to less stable funding sources, such as the wholesale markets. Against this backdrop, the resort to Eurosystem funding, though holding at still-high levels, has diminished most significantly from its peak last summer, registering a decline of 31% in the first eight months of 2013. In terms of profitability, the exceptional drive by banks in 2012 to comply with provisioning requirements exerted a significant impact on their profit and loss accounts. Indeed, for the year as a whole, losses of over € billion were recorded. The first half of 2013 has marked a change in this tendency. Banks' consolidated profit rose to somewhat more than € billion, despite the fact that provisions continue to adversely affect profit and loss accounts in a period in which the proportion of non-performing assets remained high.
I would like to emphasize once more that the whole legal framework of the banking system is a topic largely discussed nowadays, not only in Albania, but in international levels as well. Nowadays, risk management has turned into a primary issue and is in the focus of national and international institutions. In this way, regulatory systems are advised to be reviewed and elaborated to be better adapted to current developments and to financial system’s perspectives. The financial system does not operate in the vacuum. It functions under real conditions and our task is to adapt to best experiences. I think our task is to identify the best practices and to try to adjust them to the real conditions of our economy, because by adjusting them to the whole regulatory framework and banking activity, we come to a motif and motivation: the European Community. I am confident that you will use this seminar to find out joint elements in the activity of your institutions, as well as to identify the distinctions. I think it would be valuable to identify also the cases that represent what is regarded as the “best practice” in deposit insurance area. In this way, it would contribute to the achievement of the objective to standardize the regional insurance practices and to create a clearer vision on the insurance activity performance in the future. The activity of the Albanian Deposit Insurance Agency is new. As such, its capability of operating in extreme cases is not proved yet.