The CEO of Banco Santander, Héctor Grisi, and that of BBVA, Onur Genç, agreed this Wednesday that Spain, like the rest of Europe, needs “profitable banks” to be able to finance the economy and make it thrive.
During his participation in the conference “Strategic challenges and priorities of the banking sector for the next European legislative cycle” organized by the Spanish Banking Association, BBVA’s number two emphasized that banking must be able to support the green transition and technology of the Old Continent.
In this sense, the CEO of Banco Santander, Héctor Grisi, has stressed the importance of understanding that without economic growth it will be “very complicated” to carry out this transition and to face European challenges such as demography or globalization.
But the banker also focused on the need to create a regulatory framework that allows banks to be competitive not only in Europe but also in other markets, insisting that we must adapt to new times, after remembering that Europe, for example, was a pioneer in the world of telecommunications.
However, in response to a question from the President of the Spanish Banking Association, Alejandra Kindelán, the managing director of BBVA called for greater European integration, because there is uniform supervision, but no banking union.
“Complete the banking union and the capital markets union, that’s what I have to tell the authorities,” he added, a demand that Banco Santander CEO Héctor Grisi immediately signed.
“Data is the ball in football, without it you can’t play,” says Héctor Grisi, CEO of Banco Santander
In the same conversation, the two bankers also agreed on the importance of data in banking. “Data is the ball in football, without it you can’t play,” Grisi said shortly before calling for fair regulation, a demand that the CEO of BBVA also supported.
Afterwards, the chairman of the German Banking Association, Heiner Herkenhoff, acknowledged in a roundtable that regulation was the key to banking profitability, but then emphasized that the sector needed “more opportunities” to compete, suggesting that regulation also helps should.
Additionally, he added that policy decisions such as taxes that impact the sector would be added to financial regulation.
For his part, the general director of the Italian Banking Association (ABI), Giovanni Sabatini, claimed that he does not want to regulate everything and also argued for fair conditions of competition, in which the same regulation is applied to companies when they carry out the same activity and take the same risks.
Sabatini also used one of his phrases to call for the completion of the banking union and a single capital market, since “they are two sides of the same coin” and it is necessary to address the decarbonization of Europe and finance the green transition. and technological.