Denmark’s pensions sector is urging the EU pensions regulator to extend its mandate to cover the competitiveness of the industry it supervises, against providers outside the bloc. This is despite the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority’s (EIOPA) outright rejection of the idea.
EIOPA, which currently has a dual mandate to look into financial stability and consumer protection, should also be required to assess the impact of any new rules on Europe’s competitiveness, according to Insurance & Pension Denmark (IPD).
Torben Weiss Garne, executive director for legal and international affairs at IPD, told IPE: “We think an explicit competitiveness mandate for EIOPA is as important as their mandate for consumer protection and financial stability – and we think it’s too bad that the chair clearly states this is not her priority.”
In June, EIOPA chair Petra Hielkema acknowledged calls for the bloc’s financial supervisors to be given an explicit competitiveness mandate, in the context of a renewed focus on competitiveness and regulatory streamlining, but rejected the idea.
“For financial supervisors in the EU, such a mandate would be largely symbolic,” she said in an opinion article published on EIOPA’s website.
“It would do little to address the structural factors that determine Europe’s competitiveness and would likely leave supervisors with few meaningful levers to influence economic outcomes,” she said, adding that it “could create confusion about priorities, weaken supervisory credibility and ultimately risk undermining trust in the financial system.”
In Denmark, IPD said Hielkema’s stance was disappointing and misguided, and also difficult to reconcile with the conclusions of the 2024 Draghi Report on European economic competitiveness and the future of the European Union.
“Looking into the Draghi report – and the fact that there are now 95,000 pages of European financial regulation – this indicates EIOPA should also be looking at the competitiveness issue, which is also about costs,” said Weiss Garne.
“How can you regulate something without knowing what the cost of what you ask is? Not least because in the end, it’s the consumer who will bear the cost, to some degree,” he noted.
“If you don’t have this mandate, you don’t have this focus and all of us end up as losers because we don’t have the regulation which we should have,” he added.
Weiss Garne said pension providers in Denmark were so tied up in implementing regulation that it affected their capacity to develop new products and create smarter ways of delivering services.
He said: “What we want is some more impact assessment. We want to have proportionality included and more discussion about operational complexity – is it value for money?”
“It is also about avoiding unnecessary duplication. We think there’s a lot of duplication which no one looks into – because nobody cares,” he said.
