CSSF

The top representative of the City of London Corporation on Tuesday began a two-day visit to Luxembourg that includes meetings with Luxembourg for Finance, financial regulator CSSF, the finance ministry and representatives of the grand duchy’s banking sector.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF this week presented its priorities in the area of sustainable finance. The regulator said it strives to “accompany the transition of the financial sector and its players in a proactive way”. It has defined separate priorities for banks, for asset managers and for investment firms.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Monday said it expects managers of Liability Driven Investment funds, also known as LDI funds, to maintain yield buffers set last year at levels introduced to make these funds resilient to the UK Gilts crisis.

Total interest income at Luxembourg’s 120 credit institutions last year surged 39 percent as most banks were able to boost their margins from borrowing and lending activities on the back of higher central bank interest rates, according to data posted by financial supervisor CSSF. The supervisor also said, like last year, that 23 banks in the grand duchy were not profitable.

Luxembourg’s top supervisor for investment funds on Wednesday assured the country’s fund management community, describing the sector as “very robust” and speaking about “quite normal” levels of volatility, even though it is not fully immune to the liquidity issues that have rocked global financial markets in recent weeks.

Now that the initial dust on SVB’s collapse has settled, one of Europe’s top bank supervisors has a clear message for investors, bankers and financial market participants: banks in Luxembourg and elsewhere in Europe are safe and sound thanks to stringent supervision. “If rates were to still increase, our banks would not sustain losses up to a level that would put their solvency into question,” said Claude Wampach, who serves as director of banking supervision at Luxembourg’s financial regulator CSSF, speaking to Investment Officer.

Luxembourg’s financial regulator the CSSF announced last Friday afternoon that it had fined trust and corporate services provider Intertrust (Luxembourg) S.à r.l. nearly 200,000 euros at the end of last November for several failings. This included meeting professional obligations for IT risks as well as internal governance, the professional secrecy obligation and for required communication to the regulator. 

Financial supervisor CSSF has issued a fine of 1.56 million euros to the Luxembourg unit of Belgian bank Degroof Petercam after it found the firm to be in “non-compliance with its professional obligations” in regards to anti-money laundering measures.

Luxembourg’s leading financial sector associations, together with the supervisory authorities and the government, are about to launch a public campaign that seeks to elucidate the general public in the grand duchy on sustainable finance. 

In particular, the campaign aims to make clear that sustainable investing is more than just environmental ‘green finance’ and that ESG investing also relates to social issues and the governance of companies.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Friday brought attention to a warning from the grand duchy’s cyber security authorities which said an “alarming situation” has been created because more than 500 computer servers have not yet been updated with a critical software patch for Microsoft Exchange servers.