Jaime Caruana: The Basel II initiative Remarks by Mr Jaime Caruana, Governor of the Bank of Spain and Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, at the IIF Spring Membership Meeting, Madrid, 31 March - 1 April 2005. *  *  *  I would like to begin first by thanking for his kind introduction. It is an honour for me to participate once again in an event sponsored by the Institute for International Finance. It is doubly a pleasure for me to do so here in the city of Madrid. Although the title of this session is “regulation and consolidation in the financial industry”, I will not speak about consolidation in my intervention, because I believe that the role of the banking supervisor in such issues is minor compared to the role of the market. Structural changes in the financial sector, such as consolidation, should, in my opinion, be market-driven phenomena that respond to market needs - such as economies of scale, IT synergies, the benefits of diversification, gaining access to a larger client base, etc. This is particularly relevant in the EU context, where we are aiming for a truly single market. In this respect, I support all the steps the Commission is taking to remove remaining internal barriers and restrictions in pursuit of this goal. The banking supervisor’s role in issues related to consolidation is tightly defined by both the letter and spirit of EU banking legislation.
Maja Kadievska-Vojnovik: Rules and regulation update Speech by Ms Maja Kadievska-Vojnovik, Vice-Governor of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia, at the Erste Group Bank workshop “Rules and regulation update”, Skopje, 1 December 2014. *  *  *  Dear Governor Bogov, Dear Guest Speakers from Erste Group Bank, Dear representatives from financial regulatory agencies, Dear colleagues, Please, let me thank you Governor Bogov for supporting the idea of organizing such an event that summarizes financial regulatory reform after six years of the global financial crisis and also I would like to give my appreciation to the guest lecturers from Erste Group Bank for their quick response to help us to better understand it. This workshop is distinctive, in my opinion, as it will point at numerous regulatory changes aimed at supporting the vision of a financial system that would be both globally integrated and adequately regulated over the medium-to-long-term. Why we are here today? Probably, some of you have already asked this question. Why? The subject and the presentations of today’s workshop are of great importance, having in mind that, we, the Central Bank with its unique foreign reserves management function, and other institutional investors (banks, pension funds, insurance companies) that are supervised by the regulators participating in this workshop, all of us, are investors on the European and global financial markets. In that regard, understanding of the regulations that are changing the financial markets landscape is of greatest significance for each market participant.