Single Supervisory Mechanism

Participants

The participants in the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) are all the countries that form part of the Eurosystem and all European Union countries which are not in the euro area, but which want to establish a close cooperation with the European Central Bank (ECB) and therefore accept this supervisory system.

The ECB directly supervises institutions which are considered to be significant, while all other less-significant institutions are directly supervised by national competent authorities (NCAs), and indirectly supervised by the ECB.

The criteria determining whether an institution is significant are:

• Its consolidated total assets are worth over 30 billion euros.
• Its assets are worth more than 20% of the GDP of the country in which it is established, unless the consolidated total assets are less than 5 billion euros.
• It is one of the three largest credit institutions in a Member State.
• It has subsidiaries in more than one participant country, with cross-border assets or liabilities representing more than 20% of its total assets or liabilities.
• It has requested or received public financial assistance from the European Stability Mechanism or the European Financial Stability Facility.

Based on these criteria, a list of significant institutions is periodically updated and it is published in the ECB’s banking supervision website.