The banks will look to Brussels with excitement this Wednesday.

Because the EU Commission will present the long-awaited guideline for the implementation of the international banking rules (Basel III).

The German credit industry, as the umbrella association of banks and savings banks, fears a complex work with many individual rules.

The main features of the stricter capital requirements became known last week and are unlikely to have caused any cheers in the twin towers of Deutsche Bank.

This is because it is one of the institutions that have so far relied heavily on internal models for calculating their balance sheet risks and the necessary capital backing.

Markus Frühauf

Editor in business.

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Such houses now have to accept that the leeway that can be determined using their own methods - such as institution-specific data on loan default history - is limited to 27.5 percent. In other words: 72.5 percent of the equity security buffer is specified using a standardized approach. But the financial market commissioner Mairead McGuinness, who is responsible for the Basel Directive, considers the additional capital requirement to be manageable.

The Irish woman ruled out a significant increase in capital requirements on Tuesday in her speech on the tenth anniversary of the EU banking supervisory authority (EBA).

The banks have sufficient capacity to finance the economic recovery after the pandemic.

McGuinness emphasized that the EU complies with the international requirements with the Basel Directive and that the banks can also comply with them.

Below the original goal

According to estimates by the EU Commission, the new requirements will increase the minimum capital requirements of European banks by an average of 6.4 to 8.4 percent. This applies to the period up to 2030. In the medium term, i.e. up to the year 2025, the additional capital requirement will be even lower at 0.7 to 2.7 percent. Originally, the international banking supervisors who negotiate the international rules in the Basel Committee wanted to limit the additional capital required to 10 percent as part of the revision of the Basel III framework. Brussels is now even below.

However, individual large banks are threatened with very high additional capital requirements.

The Commission estimates this for ten out of 99 banks examined at 27 billion euros.

This is likely to affect those institutions in particular that have so far relied heavily on internal risk models.

These were a thorn in the side of the overseers because they regularly raised suspicions of fine arithmetic and also made comparisons between the institutes more difficult.

McGuinness recalled the goal of building a European banking union.

On the way there she still sees challenges.

This included joint crisis management and a European deposit insurance scheme.

The latter had so far encountered resistance from Germany because the balance sheets of southern European banks were to be cleared of bad loans beforehand.