Claudia Buch: Global banking, global risks - how banks and supervisors can navigate a complex environment

Keynote speech by Prof Claudia Buch, Chair of the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank, at the ECB Forum on Banking Supervision 2025, Frankfurt am Main, 13 November 2025.

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

"Resilience in times of disruption" is the theme of this year's ECB Forum on Banking Supervision. Disruption has different aspects: heightened geopolitical risks; digital innovation re-drawing the competitive landscape in which banks operate; weaker growth making competitiveness take centre stage – sometimes leading to calls for loosening the rules that were put into place after the global financial crisis.

Strong global guardrails are needed to avoid a race to the bottom in this complex and risky landscape. Yet, it is precisely the stability of the world order and the willingness and ability to cooperate that many are currently questioning: nearly two-thirds of experts surveyed by the World Economic Forum expect a more fragmented international order within the next decade.

In an adverse scenario, international cooperation may collapse, with the provision of global public goods such as financial stability suffering. In a "world of blocs", global markets would be fractured, raising operational complexity for banks. Only in a more optimistic scenario of "multilateralism reinvented", collective frameworks would provide global public goods – from climate policies to financial stability.