Monique Melis, Managing Director and Global Head, and Florian Nitschke, Director, in Duff & Phelps’ Compliance and Regulatory Consulting practice, were recently featured in Global Risk Regulator discussing Germany’s regulatory supervision around the recent fraud investigation of a large payment processing firm.
Monique commented: “This exposes Germany and the way it is structured to some degree. Germany has a procedural rules-based regime. It has been criticized for being dogmatic. Efficient regulation needs to apply both rules and principles because it needs to hold people accountable against principles and sniff its way around a problem. I don’t think Germany is like that.”
“Why didn’t BaFin (Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) do more digging earlier? The answer lies in a legalistic approach and the massive pressure they would have felt from other elements of German society. Politics played a part here,” she added.
Florian commented: “When I was at the FCA, we had interactions with BaFin; it’s fair to say that the majority of staff there are either lawyers or economists. There are not that many people with a different background, partly because of the way Germany is. You have to demonstrate qualifications in law and/or economics.”
Global Risk Regulator subscribers can read the full article here.
