Claudia Buch: Financial stability, supervision and regulation - building a 21st century infrastructure for better, evidence-based policymaking

Keynote speech by Prof Claudia Buch, Chair of the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank, at the BIS Innovation Summit, Basel, 10 September 2025.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Let me begin by thanking the organisers of the BIS Innovation Summit for inviting me to speak. This Summit provides an important platform to explore how innovation is reshaping the future of finance, with this year's theme of future-proofing central banks. Some 17 years after the great financial crisis, banks are operating in a very different landscape. In Europe, institution-building has progressed through the banking union. Digital innovation and new business models have transformed the way finance operates, and artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to accelerate these trends even further. The risk environment has changed significantly, and geopolitical risks are heightened. All of this has an impact on financial safety and soundness, financial sector regulation and supervisory decision-making.

The financial sector came through this period relatively unscathed. The benefits of financial sector reforms may therefore be easily forgotten. Some even conclude that the financial sector (and thereby the real economy) would be better off with lighter regulation and supervision. Of course, regulation and supervision must continue to evolve, and improving effectiveness and efficiency can be useful to reduce unnecessary complexity. But rolling back core safeguards or weakening resilience in the name of "lighter-touch" oversight would be to ignore what history has told us many times: we tend to extrapolate from the recent past and underestimate the vulnerabilities and fault lines that have built up in the financial system. "This time" is unlikely to be different.