christine lagarde : challenges along europe ’ s road speech by ms christine lagarde, president of the european central bank, at the international conference to mark the 30th anniversary of banka slovenije, ljubljana, 11 may 2022 * * * it is a pleasure to be in ljubljana today to discuss “ the road already travelled and contemporary challenges ”. europe can learn a great deal from the journey of slovenia in recent decades. the country has faced and overcome serious challenges over the years : its independence from yugoslavia ; joining the eu ; adopting the euro ; overcoming the crisis that erupted in 2013 ; and now the pandemic overlayered with russian war against ukraine. but time and again, slovenia has risen to the challenge and excelled. it has become an integral part of european value chains, with intra - eu trade accounting for over two - thirds of slovenia ’ s exports. it has shown resilience in the face of difficulty : for instance, its economy bounced back from the 2013 crisis to post robust growth rates before the pandemic. what proved crucial was slovenia ’ s steadfast commitment to its goal, as well as its flexibility to travel the journey towards the heart of europe. commitment and flexibility are the two yardsticks that i will apply to two challenging episodes that the whole of europe, and particularly the euro area including slovenia, has faced in the last decade. in that period, europe has faced repeated shocks, each one different. in this respect, we can sympathise with the words of the great slovene poet, france preseren. he once wrote of a man “ who from fate receives but blow on blow ”. throughout all these challenges, we at the ecb have remained committed to always fulfilling our mandate, whatever the circumstances. but, within our mandate, we have shown the necessary degree of flexibility. and so has europe. let us focus on each of the two episodes : first, the euro area crisis and the long phase of too - low inflation that it spawned ; and second, more recently, the return of a phase of higher inflation. from crisis to low - for - long inflation the great financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis delivered a much greater shock to the euro area than to other major economies. this was so because those crises had revealed – and exacerbated – the underlying weaknesses in the institutional architecture of the union. in particular, we saw that a monetary union cannot be stable – and a currency truly single –

issues, we build business intelligence through the analysis of, for example, data on sales, complaints about products and services, advertising spends, new business and product development, issues arising from queries and social media, horizon scanning and feedback from supervisors, enforcement and authorisation officers. this helps us to detect and understand where potential consumer detriment can arise and helps supervisors compile conduct risk reports on which our actions to mitigate risk will be based. we use themed inspections to focus on a specific issue, topic or product rather than on a specific institution. we identify the themes to pursue in a number of ways, including consumer queries, complaints, issues arising from previous inspections, market intelligence and annual sectoral risk assessments, as well as advice from the consumer advisory group on our consumer protection strategy and policy initiatives. 16 themed inspections are conducted by survey or by a combination of survey and on - site inspections. following a themed inspection, we issue firm - specific letters, an industry - wide letter and a press release and publish our findings on the central bank website. where we identify a specific compliance issue in an individual firm, we address this directly with the firm. a credible threat of enforcement underscores our powers to protect consumers of financial services. we take robust enforcement action aimed at promoting principled and ethical behaviour by and within regulated entities. transparent and strong action where entities or individuals fall short of required standards helps to deter poor practices, achieve compliance and encourage the behaviour we expect. we take action where firms or individuals have breached provisions in prescribed legislation, a code, or a condition, requirement or obligation imposed by the central bank. in 2013, legislation provided the bank with formal redress powers to direct regulated financial services firms to make appropriate redress to customers where they have suffered or will suffer a loss as a result of widespread or regular relevant defaults by a regulated financial services provider. where consumers suffered detriment prior to 2013, we have used our influence to obtain redress for consumers on a range of issues including payment protection insurance and credit card protection insurance, as well as part of the tracker mortgage examination. 4 / 9 bis central bankers'speeches current priorities we set out what we see as the key risks now facing consumers in our consumer protection outlook report, which was published last week. 17 these range from the absence of a consumer - focused culture in financial services firms, through the ongoing problems of high levels of indebtedness and mortgage arrears, to the implications for consumers