Brussels, (EFE).- The president of Banco Santander, Ana Botín, said on Tuesday that the banking sector does not need more regulation and considered that the cause of the turbulence in US and Swiss banks in recent months was “mismanagement”. .
“What happened was mismanagement. Everything that you should not have done has been done: risk concentration, maturity imbalance, insufficient liquidity, investing in sovereign debt at 1% or less than 1%,” Botín said during a conference organized by the Institute of International Finance (IIF). ) in Brussels.
“It had nothing to do with regulation or supervision.”
Asked about the recent turmoil in the United States, where the SVB bank went bankrupt, and Switzerland, where Credit Suisse was taken over by UBS with assistance from the Swiss government, the president of Santander stated that what happened “had nothing to do with regulation or the supervision”.
“What I would say is that first we have to have a good diagnosis, but what we don’t need is more regulation,” said Botín, who defended that the banks are not in the same situation as in 2008 and that the regulated banking sector, in particular systemic banks, “are strong”.
Focus for the next 10 years
The Spanish banker was pleased that “the European Commission has accepted that regulation is a tool for innovation and growth” and defended that it is necessary to “rethink what we want banks to do”, what is the appropriate approach for the next ten years and understand how to have “a financial system that can support growth and be profitable.”
“We have to deeply rethink how we regulate”
For the president of Santander, the “greatest opportunity for growth” is in “financing the green transition”, for which reason she advocated that Europe align its sustainability standards for banking with those developed internationally to avoid a disparity that leads to miss opportunities.
European banking supervisors have argued that the problems experienced by US and Swiss banks cannot be extrapolated to European banks and that they are in good health, but have called for avoiding complacency and maintaining vigilance, particularly in the face of rapid flight of deposits that occurred in the US