Insights

On January 17th, the Central Bank of Ireland (‘CBI’) issued a letter to the Minister for Finance Michael McGrath outlining the Central Bank’s regulatory priorities for the new year alongside its views on the macro-financial environment and the financial services landscape. The priorities relate mainly to Banks, Funds, Financial Firms, Non-Banks, Payment and E-Money institutions, Credit Unions, and Crypto Assets markets.

The Central Bank of Ireland introduced pre-emptive recovery planning requirements in 2021 and all (re)insurance undertakings have been required to have a recovery plan in place since 31 March 2022. Following submission of the first set of recovery plans by High and Medium-High Impact firms, the Central Bank carried out a thematic review and the main observations were communicated to firms.

2023 adverse scenario is the most severely used in the EU wide stress up to now. The adverse scenario assumes a hypothetical worsening of geopolitical tensions leading to a severe decline in GDP with persistent inflation and high interest rates. The adverse scenario is designed to ensure a significant severity of various macro-economic and financial shocks across all EU countries and, for the first time, depicts a breakdown of the shocks (on real gross value added) by economic sectors.

In May 2022 the European Commission issued a public consultation to gather evidence for its review of the second EU Payment Services Directive (2015/2366), and to inform its continuing work on open finance. The consultation forms part of the Digital Finance Strategy and the Retail Payments Strategy which aims to conduct a comprehensive review of the application and impact of PSD2 to assess whether legislation remains fit for purpose.

This article is a continuation of a series from Grant Thornton Financial Services Advisory that focuses on key aspects of the Individual Accountability Framework (“IAF”). In this article, we discuss the recently released Regulatory Impact Analysis (“RIA”) conducted by the Department of Finance (the “Department”) on the IAF.

Finance Bill 2022 (the Bill) published on 20 October includes the legislative provisions for the tax measures announced as part of Budget 2023 as well as introducing new measures and amendments to the Irish tax code. In this insight we outline the key measures which relate to the Financial Services industry.

Final guidelines on common procedures and methodologies for the supervisory review and evaluation process for investment firms, along with final draft Regulatory Technical Standards on Pillar 2 add-ons for investment firms are published.

The Central Bank of Ireland has announced that the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) rate on Irish exposures is to be maintained at 0.5 per cent.

How Grant Thornton can help you to estimate scope emissions for companies that do not report these metrics and incorporate these into banks’ Climate & Risk Quantification framework.

The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) has agreed a fast-track filing deadline of 1 December 2022 for Irish authorised UCITS and AIFs filing pre-contractual disclosure templates under A8 and A9 of the Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation (SFDR) which must be published by 1 January 2023.

The introduction of the Consumer Protection Act highlights the Central Bank’s continued focus on consumer protection, with the specific purpose of closing the consumer protection gap in respect of consumer-hire agreements, hire-purchase agreements, including personal contracts plans (PCPs), and other forms of indirect credit such as Buy Now, Pay Later.

Albeit the announcements made on Budget Day were relatively subtle on the indirect tax front, the Finance Bill (the Bill) introduces a variety of VAT changes of significance to the financial services industry. In this article, we focus on the most notable changes proposed.