News

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

The European Commission has published (25 January 2011) its study on Interest Rate Restrictions (IRR) in the European Union, which it had announced in its 2007 Mortgage Credit White Paper.

The European Commission has today (16 December 2010) proposed to fix two separate, binding end-dates for the migration to SEPA credit transfers (SCT) and SEPA direct debits (SDD) in an effort to phase out the use of existing national payment schemes one year (2012, for credit transfers) and two years (2013, for direct debits) following its publication in the Official Journal.

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.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has published a consultation paper entitled “Mortgage Market Review: Distribution & Disclosure” in which it outlines proposals focusing on improving the mortgage sales process, the role of intermediaries and the disclosure of information for consumers.

The effectiveness of financial education schemes was repeatedly put into questions by leading academics at a conference focusing on the benefits of applying insights from the field of behavioural economics to policy-making.