BRUSSELS — European governments are planning to ask the European Commission to review all EU laws affecting the finance industry with the aim of “simplifying” them.
The plan was discussed at a meeting of finance ministers in Copenhagen last month and is laid out in a draft joint statement from that meeting, seen by POLITICO. The draft is now being discussed by diplomats in Brussels and could still change.
If the Commission tears up its finance rulebook in the name of simplification, it would follow attempts to streamline rules in other areas including sustainability disclosures and defense.
The draft calls on the Commission to come forward with “clear priorities, timelines, and criteria for identifying areas where simplification would have the greatest impact.”
Significantly, this would include reassessing existing primary legislation for financial services, in a major escalation from ongoing simplification efforts which have largely been constrained to secondary technical standards or not-yet-published legislation.
The draft said simplification of existing rules should focus on measures “with potential high impact, including duplications and inconsistent definitions, out-dated provisions and unnecessary reporting requirements.”
The draft also calls on the EU executive to hold “structured discussions” with governments and “potentially” the European Parliament before proposing new finance rules in future, including “a clear problem statement including why existing rules are insufficient.”
It also calls on the Commission to look into annual updates of reporting requirements for finance rules, rather than new requirements applying at different times throughout the year as they now do.
The draft pushes for the EU’s finance watchdogs to “adopt a simpler and more targeted approach” to drawing up technical standards to reduce “unnecessary complexity.”
The document calls on the Commission to report back on its progress with simplification work, as well as to factor them into its upcoming report on the competitiveness of the EU’s banking system, which is expected early next year.
