Danièle Nouy – Ideal candidate

Profile of the chair of the supervisory board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism

Once European Union leaders decided to set up a single banking supervisor for the Eurozone, Danièle Nouy was always going to be a leading candidate to head it. After 40 years in this specialised field, including five running the global supervisory club and two its EU chapter, the 63-year-old Bretonne boasted a hard-to-beat résumé.

It is unfortunate, then, that her appointment in mid-December to chair the supervisory board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) at the European Central Bank (ECB) was the result of Brussels horse-trading almost a year earlier rather than her own merits. After a bitter dispute with the European Parliament over the all-male line-up on the new ECB board, finance ministers had to appoint a woman to the SSM. Tick. And once Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem had been chosen over Pierre Moscovici, his French counterpart, to chair the Eurogroup, the woman had to be French. Tick. Yet, as anyone in the business will testify, take away the politics and it would have been hard to find a candidate with superior technical skill, work ethic or supervisory experience at both national and international level.

Raised in Rennes and Quimper, Nouy could be said to have stayed in the family business – her father was a clerk at the Banque de France. After graduating in politics, public administration and law from Sciences Po and the Sorbonne, at 24 Nouy too joined the central bank and two years later, in 1976, moved into its then supervisory department, the Commission de Contrôle des Banques. Compared with other more rarified roles in central banking, Nouy enjoyed the down-to-earth nature of supervision that included not just desk-bound analysis and accounting but on-site inspections. She remained with the CCB until it was replaced nearly a decade later by the Commission Bancaire.

In 1985, together with her husband Jean-Yves, an insurance executive, and their two young daughters, Nouy moved to New York as the Banque de France’s representative. It was only a one-year secondment but it instilled in Nouy a partiality both for the English language and for the international aspects of policy. Indeed, she has described internationalism as her second-favourite drug. The first, for the record, is coffee.

In the years following her return to Paris, Nouy did her utmost to maximise the international aspects of her job, joining various European panels and eventually in 1993 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a forum for regular co-operation between 27 national supervisors, including the world’s most powerful economic policymakers. At the same time as she was heading domestic supervision in France at the time of the collapse of Crédit Lyonnais, in Basel Nouy chaired working groups on how to supervise some of the most controversial areas of banking: measuring banks’ “off-balance-sheet” risk exposure and the accounting and disclosure of derivatives holdings.

In 1996, at the age of 46, Nouy became the Basel committee’s deputy secretary-general and two years later took over the top job. In these roles, Nouy oversaw an overhaul of global prudential regulation in the so-called ‘Basel II’ package. Given what happened to the banking system and economy from 2007 onwards, some have argued that Basel II not just failed to prevent excessive financial risk-taking but encouraged it by forcing banks to hold insufficient capital and placing too much faith in private credit-rating agencies.

This is to place too much importance on a regulatory framework that was implemented once the crisis had already hit and ignores the improvements it made to the looser “Basel I” package. “Like everyone else, she could see the imbalances that were growing, but she was hardly alone in underestimating the speed and severity of the crisis when it came,” says a former Basel colleague. “She was very good at delivering what the consensus of supervisors wanted and particularly at involving the smaller EU member states, who felt outside the process”.

Within months of her return to Paris in 2003 to take over the Commission Bancaire, Nouy had been elected vice-president of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) and became its president in 2006. She also ‘Europeanised’ her own commission in line with the process of regulatory convergence set in 2001 by an expert committee established by the European Commission under the chairmanship of Alexandre Lamfalussy. She insisted that English became a working language of the commission and established joint teams with foreign regulators. Her aim was for the commission to treat the entire EU financial market as if it were domestic.

Curriculum Vitae

1950: Born in Rennes, France

1971: Degree in politics and public administration, Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris

1972: Postgraduate certificate in law, Panthéon-Assas in Paris

1974-84: Supervisor at the Commission de Contrôle des Banques, Paris

1985-86: Representative of the Banque de France in New York

1986-87: Policy expert in the foreign department of the Banque de France, Paris

1987-90: Head of research at the Commission Bancaire, Paris

1990-94: Head of supervision of French banks, Commission Bancaire

1994-96: Aide to the secretary-general of the Commission Bancaire

1996-98: Deputy secretary-general of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

1998- Secretary-general of the Basel 2003: Committee on Banking Supervision

2003-10: Secretary-general of the Commission Bancaire

2006-08: Chairwoman of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors

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2010-13: Secretary-general of the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel

2014-: Chairwoman of the supervisory board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism

She is said to be as demanding of herself as she is of others. For her, if not for the rest of her country, Sunday is not usually a day of rest. The result is that in French banking, where she is best known, she commands that most desired combination, respect and fear. Blooded as a supervisor during the French banking crisis of the early 1990s, what others see as a healthy gamble with a high return, she is thought to regard as undue risk-taking.

From 2004, she initiated a process to enhance not just the quantity but the quality of banks’ own funds and, at the height of the crisis, forced banks to make serious provision against potential losses. Some bankers have found her style of interview and inspection confrontational and were furious when she threatened in 2007 to publish their holdings in loss-making US mortgage-related securities. At the same time, her political detractors outside the industry criticise her failure to pre-empt the crisis at Dexia in late 2008 that required a huge Franco-Belgian bail-out, even though the Belgians were the lead supervisors.

When President Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration decided to revamp supervision in 2010, bringing banking and insurance oversight under one roof at the central bank under a new Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel (ACP), Nouy was a shoo-in as its first secretary-general. Her experience of building a new joint agency out of others and establishing trust between different teams was a critical factor in the ECB’s approval of her application to run the SSM. She took over as chairwoman of the supervisory board only last week (1 January) but has already set strategic management goals so that the mechanism will be ready to start work on schedule in November. Top of her list is making the SSM’s joint supervisory teams, which will combine ECB and national staff in decentralised units, work efficiently.

Externally, her biggest challenge will be to learn the new trick of emerging from the shadows as a public communicator. In Paris, while she did the basic supervisory work, it was the governor of the central bank who was the public face of bank control. In Frankfurt, at the birth of a new agency, this will be much less so. Step forward Danièle Nouy.