Esma’s Verena Ross: safeguarding the EU’s financial markets
Verena Ross struggles to put her finger on the most challenging time in an almost 30-year regulatory career that began in the UK before bringing her to mainland Europe as executive director of the EU’s new markets regulator in 2011, and its chair in 2021.
Was it her earliest days in Paris, when the European Securities and Markets Authority was trying to expand from a 35-person start-up while also shepherding the EU’s markets through an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis?
Or was it when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Ross had to confront the same practical issues as leaders of other organisations, while also trying to make sure that Europe’s markets did not buckle under the most unusual and unpredictable of circumstances?
Ross’s 300-person strong agency is also one of the flag-bearers for Europe’s capital markets union programme, a grand but so far elusive political project to replicate the US’s achievement in channelling trillions of dollars from households and savers into debt and equity issued by companies of all shapes and sizes.
Esma is now trying to set policies for some of the most intricate areas of traditional markets, while making its mark in new realms such as sustainability, where it is leading a transparency drive, and cryptocurrency, where it will soon assume responsibilities for directly overseeing parts of Europe’s industry.
“One of the challenges of these jobs is just how broad it is, you need to know the remit of what is going on, because you never quite know where the next issue might be coming from,” she says. “But within that you clearly need to prioritise . . . where the core themes are at any point in time.”
In October, Esma unveiled its strategy for the next five years, ticking the traditional boxes of fostering effective markets and preserving financial stability, as well as the modern ones including enabling sustainable finance and facilitating innovation and the use of data.
Ross is no stranger to breaking new ground in finance. When she was appointed to lead Esma, having a woman in such a role was still unusual enough for a parliamentarian to describe her words as “sweet and soft” in a public hearing.
By the time she was appointed chair in 2021, the world had changed, and she joined the growing ranks of women leading large financial institutions, such as Christine Lagarde at the European Central Bank and Elke König at the eurozone’s Single Resolution Board. She is conscious that gender is “something that people have taken into consideration when making certain choices” and circumspect about the role it has played in her life.
“I hope I managed to get to the position [I’m in], not just because I’m a woman, but also because I have a certain experience and knowledge that people appreciate and that they believe I can do the job,” she says.
“It’s not my first motivation to be recognised as a female leader,” she later adds when asked about hopes for her legacy. “What I want to be recognised for is being a fair and inclusive leader that brings people together to achieve their best.”
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Laura Noonan
