European Banking Federation: Build a comprehensive regulatory approach to crypto-technologies

The European Banking Federation, founded in 1960, is the voice of the European banking sector, uniting 32 national banking associations in Europe that together represent some 4,500 banks – large and small, wholesale and retail, local and international – employing about 2.5 million people.

The group has called for governments and businesses to build a “comprehensive regulatory approach” to crypto-technologies.

It said, “Crypto-technologies are one of the major IT innovations to have appeared in recent years, proposing new systems, processes and ways to transact. They provide a distributed recording system which guarantees the possibility of identifying irrefutably transactional data. Furthermore, they build and monitor any transaction or event via a joint network without intervention from a third party or central authority.”

It added that blockchain technology “provides a number of interesting opportunities both for financial institutions individually and for the collective ecosystem”. It offers clear opportunities to reduce costs of moving and handling money, to secure consumer spending, and to introduce greater liquidity to the market. It also improves offers of products and services and increases banks’ velocity in all their activities.

Although it acknowledged that “Bitcoin” represents probably one of the most well-known examples of crypto-technology, it thinks that its future as a currency is unclear.

In its recommendations, it said, “Conduct a joint assessment by both governments and industry on the opportunities and impact of crypto-technologies” and “Build a comprehensive regulatory approach to crypto-technologies to help overcome uncertainty for legitimate users e.g. transactions in crypto-currencies should be subject to the same regulatory standards as transactions executed in electronic or physical money, in particular in relation to Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist-Financing.”