Stabilità e proporzionalità nella disciplina delle banche. Il caso del creditocooperativo italiano

The ‘one-size-fits-all’approach to banking regulation may harm smaller institutions and jeopardize competition. For this reason, the proportionality principle requires supervisors to ‘calibrate’ the actual application of prudential regulation according to the size and complexity of each bank. Nonetheless, while economies of scale are still expected to play a fundamental role, even the high costs of enforcement experienced by supervisors may hinder the actual application of the proportionality principle. To address these obstacles, the ‘CRD V package’ adopted a different approach to proportionality and introduced a specific set of tailored rules for “small and non-complex institutions” (for example, providing a lighter reporting requirement or a milder approach to SREP). However, since supervisory activities must always be carried out ‘at the highest level of consolidation’, the mandatory participation of community banks in a ‘cooperative group’ excludes the application of the special regime drawing these institutions within the stricter rules provided for “large banks”. Although reasonable for traditional banking groups — usually the expression of a single economic entity — such a conclusion does not hold for cooperative banking groups, whose peculiarities must be taken into proper consideration by the supervisor.