Welcome address by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the tenth anniversary of the Single Supervisory Mechanism

Frankfurt am Main, 6 November 2024

It is a pleasure to welcome you to this event celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM).

The SSM became operational ten years ago, almost to the day, on 4 November 2014. It was the most significant step forward in European integration since the introduction of the euro.

If we think back to how the banking sector was faring a decade ago, we can see just how much has changed. The euro crisis had exposed significant weaknesses: low equity buffers, high levels of non-performing loans and deep exposures to domestic sovereigns. Our challenge, as Danièle Nouy said at the time, was to “help rebuild confidence in the balance sheets of SSM area banks” amid a fragmented supervisory landscape.^[1]

Today, however, the situation is vastly different. Despite the major shocks that have hit the euro area in…