A foundational question in post-crisis financial regulation returned to the fore in Paris last month, when Banque de France Governor Emmanuel Moulin stepped to the podium at the annual conference of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR) to confront one of the sector's most enduring debates: must regulators choose between a competitive financial industry and a resilient one, or can both objectives be pursued simultaneously? The speech, later published by the Bank for International Settlements on 12 November 2026, signals that Europe's top prudential voices are increasingly unwilling to accept the trade-off framing that has dominated regulatory discourse for more than a decade.

The False Dichotomy at the Heart of Financial Regulation

The tension Moulin addressed is not merely academic. Since the sweeping post-2008 regulatory overhaul — which introduced higher capital buffers, leverage constraints, liquidity requirements, and intensified supervisory scrutiny across the European Union — the financial industry has periodically argued that the cumulative burden of compliance disadvantages European banks relative to their American and Asian counterparts. The logic has intuitive appeal: if regulators demand that institutions hold more capital and maintain more conservative balance sheets, those institutions may be less able to price aggressively, invest in innovation, or expand market share against less-constrained rivals. By framing his speech around the question of whether competitiveness and resilience constitute an oxymoron or a complementarity, Moulin was engaging directly with that industry argument — and, by his choice of framing, signalling where his answer lands.

Moulin's Case for Complementarity

The Governor's position, as conveyed through the structure and title of the address itself, is that the assumed opposition between competitive dynamism and prudential soundness is a false one. This is not a novel claim in central banking circles, but it carries particular weight when delivered by the chairman of France's principal supervisory authority at a formal ACPR conference — an institution that holds direct oversight responsibility over banks, insurers, and investment firms operating in one of the European Union's largest financial markets. The argument, broadly, runs as follows: a financial institution that is genuinely resilient — one that can absorb shocks, maintain access to funding under stress, and continue lending through downturns — is also one that earns the sustained trust of counterparties, depositors, and investors. That trust, over any meaningful time horizon, is itself a competitive asset. Stability, in this reading, is not a constraint on competitive advantage but a precondition for it.

Why This Debate Matters Now

The timing of the ACPR conference is significant. European financial policymakers are navigating a period of acute complexity: the finalisation of European Banking Authority guidelines implementing the Basel III endgame, persistent questions about the global competitiveness of EU-headquartered banks in wholesale markets, the rapid rise of non-bank financial intermediaries operating outside the traditional supervisory perimeter, and the accelerating digitisation of financial services — all of which create pressure on regulators to revisit the balance they strike between stability and growth. Meanwhile, political appetite across Europe for a more growth-oriented regulatory stance has been growing, with policymakers in Brussels and national capitals increasingly scrutinising whether the post-crisis regulatory settlement has overcorrected toward caution at the expense of economic dynamism.

The Supervisory Dimension

As both Governor of the Banque de France and Chairman of the ACPR, Moulin occupies a dual role that places him at the intersection of monetary policy, macroprudential oversight, and microprudential supervision. That dual mandate matters for interpreting the speech. A central bank governor speaking purely as a monetary authority might frame resilience primarily in terms of systemic stability and financial conditions. A supervisory chairman, by contrast, is acutely aware of firm-level competitive dynamics — of how regulatory requirements shape individual institutions' strategic choices, risk appetite, and capacity to serve clients. Moulin's ability to speak from both vantage points simultaneously lends his argument a breadth that neither a pure central banker nor a pure supervisor could easily replicate.

The Broader European Context

France is not alone in grappling with this tension. Across the EU, regulators and finance ministries are under pressure to articulate how European financial institutions can remain globally relevant while operating within a framework explicitly designed to prevent the kind of systemic failures witnessed in 2008 and, more recently, in the regional banking stress episodes of 2023. The European Central Bank's supervisory arm has itself acknowledged that the European banking sector has emerged from recent years of elevated interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty in a substantially stronger capital position than a decade ago — a data point that, Moulin's framing implies, ought to be read not as evidence of regulatory overreach but as validation that the complementarity thesis holds in practice.

What This Means for the Industry

For financial institutions operating under ACPR oversight, and for the broader European banking community watching France's regulatory posture, Moulin's remarks offer a clear signal: the supervisor does not regard forthcoming adjustments to the regulatory framework — whatever form the Basel III implementation ultimately takes in the EU — as a retreat from prudential standards. Rather, the message is that well-capitalised, well-governed, operationally resilient institutions are better positioned to compete, not less. That framing has practical consequences. It suggests the ACPR will resist arguments that position regulatory relief as the primary lever for restoring European bank competitiveness, pushing back against the notion that cutting capital requirements is the straightforward path to creating a more dynamic financial sector. Instead, Moulin's conference address points toward a supervisory philosophy in which the pursuit of resilience and the pursuit of competitiveness are treated as a single, integrated strategic objective — one that challenges both regulators and the institutions they oversee to find solutions that do not force a choice between safety and performance.

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