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Foreign currency indebtedness in new EU member states has had serious post-crisis consequences, where a substantial currency mismatch has contributed to an alteration in the macroeconomic and financial risk profile of individual countries. A pivotal challenge ahead for emerging Europe will be to strengthen institutional and monetary credibility and reinforce stable and efficient capital markets that are less dependent on foreign capital inflows. This would ultimately reduce countries’ vulnerability to future shocks to the economy, and facilitate their full-blown recovery.

The Payment Services Directive was intended to provide more price transparency for users and a level playing field for efficient competition among different payment services by decreasing the inhibiting effects of different legislation, cross-subsidisation and non-cost-based pricing. The European Commission, however, intended most of these effects to come about through market-led initiatives.

ECRI has published the Autumn edition of its quarterly Newsletter. The issue includes information about our upcoming events and our research, together with the latest news about credit markets and retail financial services.

To download ECRI News, please click here.   

In this ECRI Commentary, Elina Pyykkö provides a snapshot of the current state of household credit markets in Europe. She assesses how member states have recovered from the financial crisis by looking at credit markets and other financial indicators. The evidence is used to discuss what grounds the different stages of recovery provide for new EU-wide legislative proposals, in particular the proposed directive on mortgage credit.

ECRI has published the Summer edition of its quarterly Newsletter. The issue includes information about our upcoming and recent events and our research, together with news about credit markets and retail financial services.

This report aims to contribute to the debate on how the EU could most efficiently respond to the challenges posed and the deficiencies revealed by the financial crisis in the area of retail credit. It is based in part on discussions that took place within the CEPS-ECRI Task Force on A New Retail Credit Regime for Europe – Setting the Right Priorities, which met between May 2010 and January 2011. Given the policy directions, the discussions focused largely on the largest component of retail credit, mortgages.

CEPS Senior Fellow Rym Ayadi argues in her latest publication that European policy-makers ought to rethink their approach to financial market integration in order to continue the construction of the internal market for retail financial services. Urgent efforts should be taken to ensure financial safety for retail consumers and to enhance consumer protection at the EU level.

After three and a half years at the European Credit Research Institute (ECRI) within CEPS, Marc Rothemund has joined JP Morgan in London, where he will work in the bank’s government relations department. While at ECRI Marc specialised in the areas of consumer loans, credit reporting and retail financial services issues, and he produced the annual ECRI Statistical Package.

Report of the ECRI-CEPS seminar, 13 January 2011

Karel Lannoo and Maria Gerhardt

Download report as pdf here

ECRI has published the Autumn edition of its quarterly Newsletter. The issue includes, inter alia, - a short commentary on the need for pan-European deposit insurance scheme, coverage of the third meeting of the CEPS/ECRI Task Force on retail credit and a look at Commission initiatives in the area of retail investment products as well as migration to SEPA.

To download ECRI News, please click here.