Hence, the group’s credit risk model might be developed in the parent bank, while the group’s liquidity is managed through a foreign subsidiary, and the group’s derivatives trading is done in yet another subsidiary. That is why integration gives rise to a structure that often seems to be in conflict with the present regulatory structure. But the problem is not integration – the problem is that our regulatory framework is not designed for a single market for financial services. Let me give you a concrete example of this. In the Nordic and Baltic countries – excluding Iceland – there are six banking groups with significant cross-border activities. Each one of these cross-border groups has regulatory contacts with seven supervisors and eight central banks.2 It is commonplace to  1  Banking Supervision Committtee (2004), “Cross-border banking and its possible pol-icy implications”, December  2  The Bank of Lithuania also has supervisory responsibility. 2  BIS Review 35/2005  note that Western Europe is over-banked. It would not be outrageous to say that it is also over-crowded with regulatory authorities. Our conclusion is that we, as national authorities in the EU, must solve the issues that integration gives rise to, rather than stopping integration. This might sound very obvious, but some of us authorities still only pay lip service to the idea of the single market. Or we love the idea of the single market as long as it means that our own banks survive as national champions and are able to expand abroad.
As I have stressed many times recently, and in particular over the last few months during the COVID crisis, the key to understanding the degree of success of policies or the occurrence of potential unexpected consequences is to proceed with proper and timely evaluations based on sufficient background information. This is the only way to ascertain to what extent policies are working or need adjustment in terms of their timing, magnitude and focus. Global authorities are now in uncharted waters in terms of the dimension of the crisis and its multiple ramifications, and it is very difficult to calibrate the response of economic policy. Only good and timely data can allow us to design an optimal policy reaction in such a complex context. The present crisis has also stressed the importance of having data in real time: in the last few months, information on the use of payment cards, traffic on roads and at airports, electricity consumption, mobility, Google searches and so on has been fundamental for assessing the magnitude of the economic slump and the subsequent timid recovery. These indicators will hardly join the compact and methodologically sound realm of official statistics; but I think we should also pay attention and invest some resources in understanding them, familiarising ourselves with their use and incorporating them into our forecasting models. Probably, some of these indicators could be temporarily considered “experimental statistics”, a label statistical institutions may use to explore new fields and to convey to users the as yet not fully sound nature of these data.