Welcome speech by SRB Chair Dominique Laboureix at the SRB Economic Conference 2025

[Check against delivery]

Ladies and gentlemen,

Dear colleagues,

Dear friends,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to this conference and to see such a distinguished audience of policymakers, academics and practitioners gathered to discuss issues that lie at the heart of our field.

Events like this are particularly valuable because they bring together the different communities that shape the evolution of resolution policy. Policymakers design the frameworks, practitioners confront their practical implications, and academics provide the analytical foundations that allow us to test, refine and sometimes rethink our approaches. Bringing these perspectives together is essential if we want our work to remain both intellectually rigorous and operationally relevant.

Let me begin with a word about yesterday’s “Resolution Young Researcher Workshop”. I am very pleased to say that it was a genuine success. The quality of the contributions, the intellectual curiosity of the participants and the lively exchanges were extremely encouraging.­­

For those of us working in resolution policy, this is particularly encouraging. Resolution is still a young field. Unlike other branches of financial regulation that have developed gradually over many decades, modern resolution regimes were largely created from scratch in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This means that, perhaps more than in older areas of financial policy, our work depends heavily on developing solid theoretical and empirical foundations.

And if yesterday’s workshop is any indication, the next generation of scholars is already making a very meaningful contribution to this effort.

The research presented today touches on some of the most important questions that continue to shape the policy debate around bank resolution and financial stability. It also reflects perfectly the title of this conference: “learning from the past and looking to the future.”

One of these papers concerns the enduring challenge of “too big to fail.” More than fifteen years have passed from the global financial crisis and the establishment of FSB’s Key Attributes – the first policy reaction to that crisis. But we are still asking ourselves: have we truly changed market expectations about government support for large banks? 

Is too big to fail really a thing of the past?

One of the papers supporting today’s discussion suggests that expectations have indeed evolved since the Great Financial Crisis, with market participants assigning a higher probability that creditors of large banks would bear losses rather than rely on full government support. By the way, perhaps, the more interesting issue is not the precise figure attached to that probability but the mere fact that the confidence in our resolution framework has steadily grown. This is good news overall. However, I doubt that it means that our journey is complete.

Trust is hard to establish. It cannot simply be declared in legislation. It is gradually built through institutional design, through consistent policy choices and, sometimes, through the experience of crises themselves. The very fact that markets still attach a non-negligible probability to government support reminds us that credibility is not a binary concept. It evolves slowly, and it is constantly tested. We move in that direction.

I am used to say that I am paid to worry, but this time let me be positive: we are getting there.

Another paper that will be discussed today invites us to step back and take a much longer historical view of banking systems. Looking across more than a century of financial history, one fact emerges: crises often leave banking systems more concentrated than they were before. Large banks tend to survive, and sometimes even expand their relative importance in the aftermath of turmoil.

This observation forces us to confront an interesting tension. On the one hand, consolidation may reflect genuine economic forces—economies of scale, technological change or competitive dynamics. On the other hand, if crises systematically reinforce the dominance of the largest institutions, we should also reflect on whether the policy environment, intentionally or not, may play a role in shaping that outcome.

Moreover, thinking dynamically, while addressing too-big-to-fail, we may also be making the next crisis potentially harder to manage by allowing our “biggest” lenders to become even bigger. If the system continues to evolve towards greater concentration, ensuring the credibility and effectiveness of resolution tools becomes even more important.

Knowing this, it would seem that after every crisis, our job becomes more relevant for deal with the next one.

Another theme that you will explore is how rapidly stress can propagate through the financial system once confidence begins to erode. Using granular data on deposit flows and interbank payments, researchers are now able to trace deposit flows almost in real time, revealing how quickly funding pressures can spread across institutions during episodes of turmoil.

This new evidence reminds us that modern financial systems operate at extraordinary speed. Digitalisation, instant payment technologies and the growing role of large institutional depositors mean that liquidity stress can materialise far more rapidly than in the past. This is of course an important lesson learned from the FSB report on the 2023 turmoil.

For authorities responsible for crisis management, this creates a new challenge. The window for intervention becomes shorter. Liquidity needs to be provided quickly and decisively.

These developments are closely connected to the broader question of how to remain “crisis ready” in a changing financial system. Financial intermediation is evolving rapidly, shaped by new actors, technological innovation, digital platforms and increasingly interconnected with other counterparties.

Such changes raise fundamental questions about how crises might unfold in the future. Will stress propagate more quickly through digital networks or across different categories of intermediaries? Will market reactions become more nonlinear? And how should supervisory and resolution authorities adapt their analytical tools to keep pace with these developments?

These questions show exactly why continued dialogue between practitioners, policymakers and researchers is so important. 

Resolution policy may have been created relatively recently, but it is rapidly becoming a rich and dynamic area of research. The intellectual foundations of the field are strengthening year by year.

Let me therefore conclude by thanking all the researchers who have contributed their work to this conference, as well as the panellists, the organisers and participants who make this exchange possible.

And… I very much look forward to coming back later today to present the Resolution Young Researcher Award.

Thank you very much.