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This chapter investigates the demand for proportionate regulation, in response to the great wave of prudential reregulation that followed the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This has resulted, not only to a significant tightening of the prudential requirements, but also to a drastic increase in the intensity and complexity of day-to-day supervision, including supervisory reporting. For smaller banks, the challenge is daunting and could have grave competitive implications. Their predicament has turned the necessity and proportionality of the new prudential requirements into a central theme of the banking regulatory debate. The chapter then looks at the technique used by the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) II to relieve the members of the newly established class of ‘small and non-complex institutions’ from excessive and unjustifiable regulatory burdens — in particular, those relating to supervisory reporting requirements and public disclosure obligations. It also considers the streamlining and integration of all information-related obligations of banking institutions to reduce the complexity of the existing system, eliminating duplicative reporting by institutions, and improving the accessibility and usability of regulatory information.

This chapter explores bank resolution financing in the Banking Union, a project launched in 2012 as a direct response to the euro area’s crisis that began in Spain. The Banking Union is a streamlined and highly centralized regime for the supervision and resolution of all banks in the euro area and beyond, based on a novel, complex institutional set-up. The Union relies on supranational decision-making, especially with regard to the largest and most important banking institutions. The chapter assesses the Banking Union’s two-pronged institutional construction: the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM). It concludes by discussing how the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) affects resolution financing in the Banking Union.