Who we are

Finance Watch’s Annual Report 2019 describes among others the continuous expansion of the Finance Watch membership, our involvement in decisive legislative European processes such as the European Sustainable Finance Strategy and the return of Thierry Philipponnat in the Finance Watch family as our new Head of Research and Advocacy.

Finance Watch’s Annual Report 2018 describes how the organisation has succeeded in broadening its civil society network to gain more and more support for its demands for more fundamental reforms of the financial sector.

This activity report also gives an overview about Finance Watch’s key positions and publications linked to the EU’s legislative agenda such as Sustainable Finance, FinTech, Non-performing loans, the Pan-European Personal Pension Product, and Brexit.

The ten-year anniversary of the global financial crisis in September 2018 was a good moment to alert the media and citizens to how little has fundamentally changed in the financial system; Finance Watch’s report, “Ten Years After: Back to Business as Usual”, contained a critical assessment of post-crisis financial regulation in Europe and gained EU wide media coverage.

The European Financial Inclusion Network activities were transferred to Finance Watch on the 13th of June 2018. EFIN’s publications can be found in the Financial Inclusion section of our Policy & Regulation portal, including elements of a bibliography on financial inclusion.

For reference, EFIN’s official documentation can be downloaded here:

Annual reports: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009-2010

Newsletters 2017: Special edition on Brexit, December, October & November, September, June, May, April, March, February, January

Newsletters 2016: December, November, October, May, April, March

EFIN members as of last day of activity: Download list

EFIN official act of dissolution (2018)

The report 2017 describes Finance Watch’s activities in the last year and plans for 2018 to promote public interest outcomes in financial reform, including a commentary on ongoing policy debates around bank regulation, pension reform, consumer protection and sustainable finance, among others.

Finance Watch is made up of 48 civil society Members from 12 European countries and has more than 30,000 supporters from the general public. It was created after the financial crisis to work on financial reform and regulation, acting as a citizens’ counterweight to the powerful financial lobby.

In 2016, our team attended 131 meetings with policymakers, prepared 18 consultation responses, public hearings and reports, organised two public conferences, and were cited on social media and in the press on a wide variety of issues. Download our 2016 annual report

Finance Watch has published its annual report for 2015. The report sets out Finance Watch’s achievements in 2015 and challenges for 2016, including work on MiFID II, Capital Markets Union, Better Regulation, bank bail-in, climate finance, fundraising, expanding the civil society network working on European financial reform, and the changing political climate for financial reform, among other things. Read the press release or download the 2015 Annual Report

Finance Watch has published its annual report for 2014. The report includes a detailed description of our public interest advocacy on a variety of EU legislative and non-legislative dossiers in 2014, as well as updates on our governance, funding and operational activities during the year.

Brussels, 23 May 2014 – Finance Watch, the public interest advocacy group dedicated to making finance serve society, has published its annual report for 2013.

• Download annual report 2013 (pdf, EN)
• Press release (23 May 2014)

The first Finance Watch Annual Report covers our activities over the period from the creation of the organisation in June 2011 until December 2012. It is also available in German.

Finance Watch’s mission is summed up in our motto, “making finance serve society”.

Our vision is for a sustainable financial system that serves society and is founded on investing and not betting.

We would like to see:

– banking systems that are resilient and effective, directing credit to productive use without extracting economic rents or transferring credit risks to society, and

– financial markets that encourage productive investment in the real economy and discourage excessive or harmful types of speculation.

Before either of these can happen, our political leaders and civil society must act together to break the dominance of the powerful financial industry lobby.

Finance Watch is working to share this vision with the public, regulators, political representatives, academics, think tanks, the media and economists, as well as the bankers and business leaders of tomorrow.

We see the following measures as essential steps towards realising our vision:

– reduce the overall level of financialisation of society

– reduce the costs of intermediation by the financial industry

– build a resilient banking system that serves society and is not founded on moral hazard (including under a Banking Union)

– raise awareness of the policy implications of credit- and money-creation by the banking sector

– build a financial system geared towards sustainable investing

– limit excessive speculation, such as commodity speculation and high-frequency trading

– channel savings into sustainable long-term investments in the real economy

– regulate the financial sector effectively

– protect the interests of the general public

– restore ethical behaviour to the actors of the banking and financial sectors

Finance Watch works according to the following principles from its Articles of Association:

– The financial industry plays an important role in allocating capital, coping with risk and providing financial services and this role has strong public interest implications.

– The essential role of the financial system is to allocate capital to productive use in a transparent and sustainable manner.

– The purpose of finance is to serve the real economy. The situation where the economy becomes subordinated to finance must be rejected because it is destructive of economic and social structures.

– Whilst profitability constitutes both a legitimate objective and a necessary condition for the sustainability of financial institutions, the pursuit of profitability should not be conducted to the detriment of public interest.

– The transfer of credit risk to society at large is not acceptable.

– The general objective of Finance Watch is an economic organisation of society where the needs of the real economy to have access to capital and to financial services are fulfilled in a sustainable, equitable and transparent manner.

In the summer of 2010, a group of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) noticed that they were being inundated with requests to meet representatives of the financial industry. At the same time, they were dealing with increasingly technical financial legislation coming through Brussels in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2007.

This cross-party group of 22 MEPs became concerned that an imbalance in lobbying could lead to undemocratic outcomes as reform proposals were reshaped or weakened by the industry lobby on their way to becoming law. They therefore launched a call for action in July 2010, entitled “Call for a finance watch“.

Their petition found strong support in Brussels and beyond. In the next five months, nearly 200 national politicians and MEPs from a wide range of political parties and EU member states signed up to the call. The list of signatories is available here.

In December 2010, some of the initial group of MEPs funded a six-month project to investigate whether a new, independent body could be created to improve the way the interests of ordinary citizens were represented in the debate on the future of financial regulation. Over the course of more than 120 meetings with representatives of civil society and other organisations, a set of concrete proposals for Finance Watch was drawn up.

Finance Watch was registered on 28 April 2011 as an Association Internationale Sans But Lucratif (international non–profit association) under Belgian law and held its founding general assembly in Brussels on 30 June 2011, where members adopted the association’s statutes and elected the Finance Watch Board. The Board appointed Thierry Philipponnat as the organisation’s first Secretary General.

The first staff were hired in autumn 2011 and offices taken in Square de Meeus, near to the European Parliament. The team grew further in 2012 and is now 13 people strong.

In April 2014, the secretariat moved into its new offices, located Rue d’Arlon 92.

In May 2014, Thierry Philipponnat resigned as Secretary General of Finance Watch. Benoît Lallemand, then co-head of policy analysis for Finance Watch, became Acting Secretary General until the end of 2014.

Christophe Nijdam became Secretary General on 1 January 2015 and resigned in December 2016.

Benoît Lallemand, then head of strategic development for Finance Watch, became Secretary General in January 2017.

In April 2018, the secretariat moved into its new offices, located Rue Ducale 67, 1000 Brussels.