Cebs releases template for supervisory college agreements

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LONDON - The Committee of European Banking Supervisors (Cebs) has produced a revised template for written agreements within colleges of supervisors. Cebs field-tested the template in the first half of 2008 to judge its operational use, which it says is flexible enough to be employed in practice.

Since mid-2006 Cebs has developed the use of supervisory colleges for European national regulators to collaborate and share information for the cross-border supervision of the European Union (EU)'s 17 largest banks. It published the first results of its work in December 2007.

The field-testing has been conducted on eight out of the 10 supervisory colleges participating since the beginning of Cebs' project on operational networks. Cebs says the template was in most cases adapted to the specific banking groups, after which it was discussed among supervisors participating in the respective colleges.

No legal obstacles have been encountered within testing. The crisis management section was shortened and reference made to the memorandum of understanding on cross-border financial stability. The paper has also been more generally streamlined, to remove elements also to be found in either Cebs guidelines or the revised EU Capital Requirements Directive approved by the Ecofin Council on December 2, 2008.

The document can be downloaded here.