Communiqué, issue 5, 2003
Articles
- Approaching enlargement
- Changes in Europe's financial services market
- Foundation seminar: living and working conditions in 2010
- EIRO expands to cover ten enlargement countries
- Promoting employee financial participation
- Enlargement: longer working hours in the acceding and candidate countries
- European Restructuring Monitor
- Observers from the acceding countries join the Administrative Board
Previous issues of Communiqué
Changes in Europe’s financial services market are only just beginning, concludes the second Sector Futures feature from the EMCC, now available online.
Electronic banking, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, the arrival of the euro, and supermarket credit cards and loans are just a few of the changes that have transformed traditional banking over the past two decades. The spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) is identified as the main driver of change, spurred on by European integration and the proposal to create a single market in financial services. The Foundation’s European Monitoring Centre on Change (EMCC) also looks at restructuring and social trends affecting the sector in this second Sector Futures article.
A decade of intense change
During the past decade, the number of credit institutions in Europe has been almost halved, due to mergers and acquisitions and ‘cooperations’. There have also been huge job cuts in the financial industry. However, the EMCC Sector Futures feature on the financial services market reveals that to date most mergers have taken place in Member States rather than across borders.
New initiatives and services
The move from state-financed to private pension systems, one possible means of offsetting the explosion of the so-called pension time bomb, will provide a major boost to the savings and capital markets. Today, the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands hold over 50% of the private pension funds assets in the EU, a figure that is expected to rise significantly should EU governments allow individuals to take greater responsibility for their own financial futures.The article argues that this kind of privatisation of welfare across the EU could spawn new services such as private health care and unemployment insurance, resulting in greater flexibility in the financial market.
While the article acknowledges that there is a risk that some groups of people will be left behind as a result of these changes, it also asserts that new openings for non-traditional providers – including community or trade union based initiatives and credit unions – will offer new solutions not open to commercial lending and credit institutions.