Trends in European banking supervision design: is there a path to an optimal architecture for financial supervision in the EU?

This paper purports to identify the key evolutionary trends of financial supervisory architecture, as arising from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and the recent Covid-19 crisis. It builds on such analysis to discuss, from a comparative perspective, the chief advantages and drawbacks of the main options available, comprehending the so called sectoral model, the single supervisory model and the Twin Peaks model, also addressing hybrid variations of these models and the emergence of new coordination functions to be considered regardless of the overall model applied. Relying on that critical and comparative analysis, the paper endeavours in its last part to tentatively give a very broad and succinct picture about the current crossroad of the European architecture of financial supervision, in light of multiple factors that condition its evolution, putting forward both a short term perspective, chiefly focused on mere supervisory convergence, and a necessary longer-term perspective oriented towards a potential re-design of the whole European financial supervisory architecture.