Bank of Italy has asked the banks classified as significant institutions under Regulation (EU) no.1024 of October 15, 2013 to adopt the ECB questionnaire, as integrated with the national regulatory specificities, for the purpose of carrying out the Fit and Proper assessment envisaged by Article 24 of Ministerial Decree no.169/2020 as of 15 June 2022.

The questionnaire, alongside the other documents provided for by the applicable regulatory framework, shall be transmitted via IMAS portal.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published a letter addressed to the European Parliament on climate change.

In particular, ECB highlights the  scale and irreversibility of climate change certainly call for urgent action from all stakeholders to accelerate the greening of the economy.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s dependency on fossil fuel imports from Russia and emphasised the pressing need to speed up the green transition.

The ECB’s Governing Council has made a firm commitment to consider climate change more systematically in its monetary policy framework.

Regarding the consideration of climate change in the ECB’s asset purchases framework, , Action 9 of our detailed roadmap of climate change-related actions states the commitment to adjust the framework guiding the allocation of corporate sector bond purchases (CSPP) to take climate change into consideration by end-2022.

This includes an assessment of potential biases in our purchase benchmarks, which serves as an input for the subsequent proposals for the definition of eventual alternatives (Action 4).

As previously communicated, these adjustments will include the introduction of criteria for issuers to better align their practices with EU legislation implementing the Paris Agreement.

The alignment will be measured using climate-related metrics and/or by assessing the issuers’ commitment to achieving such goals.

In addition to the conceptual considerations mentioned above, the adjusted framework must be without prejudice to the achievement of our primary objective of price stability and it needs to comply with the general principles of European Union law, such as proportionality, an open market economy and equal treatment.

The CSPP framework will also be adapted in line with our future disclosure requirements. Later this year, the ECB will announce a detailed plan to introduce disclosure requirements for private sector assets as a new eligibility criterion or as a basis for the differentiated treatment of collateral and asset purchases, as detailed in Action 5 on our climate roadmap. Such requirements will take into account EU policies and initiatives relating to environmental sustainability disclosure and reporting.

The main purpose of these disclosure requirements is to incentivise issuers to adopt disclosure practices that ensure more complete and comparable information. This will ultimately allow the Eurosystem to better incorporate climate-related information in its risk management framework, while maintaining proportionality through adjustments for small and medium-sized enterprises.