Top European Union bankers will call next week for a regulatory shake-up to cut the cost of compliance for banks and insurers that operate across borders, though the prospect of rapid change remains slim.
EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy is coming under increasing pressure to make compliance cheaper for multinational financial companies, which currently have to report to every national regulator, a costly and time-consuming process.
The European Financial Services Round Table (EFR), which meets with McCreevy in Stockholm next Tuesday, will step up its campaign to persuade McCreevy to overhaul supervision.
The group favours a system in which the watchdog of the country where a multinational bank has the bulk of its operations or headquarters would be the lead regulator for the pan-EU group.
"He should try to work on the lead supervisor authority principle, which is not supported by everybody. It would make it very much more easy for us," EFR member Hans Dalborg said.
Smaller countries whose top banks are in foreign hands fear being left out of the regulatory loop, and some large regulators doubt their smaller peers could oversee a pan-European bank.
"We have no expectations this is a quick fix. This will take a long time," said Dalborg, also chairman of Nordic bank Nordea .
Mr McCreevy is expected to repeat his mantra of "evolution and not revolution" in regulatory change. "I think they need a bit of revolutionary stuff," said EFR Chairman Pehr Gyllenhammar.
Next week's one-day seminar will be attended by top officials from EU financial insurers and banks such as AXA, Barclays, ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Munich Re and Generali.
Mr McCreevy will be encouraged to create a pan-European market for retail financial products by tackling the thorny issue of how to deal with different consumer protection regimes.
He will find support for his planned amendment this summer of an EU banking directive to make it more difficult for a national supervisor to bloc a foreign takeover. "What is worrying right now is that we have increased protectionism. We were following the ABN battle to buy an Italian bank. That was a fairly sad story, but the ending was pretty good," Mr Gyllenhammar said.