The European Association of Co-operative Banks (EACB) is pleased to contribute to the European Commission’s Call for Evidence on the digital omnibus. The EACB is committed to supporting a regulatory environment that fosters innovation, legal certainty and operational efficiency for cooperative banks, their members and customers.
The EACB strongly supports the Commission’s efforts to simplify and harmonise the EU’s digital regulatory framework. In our response, we stress the importance of greater coherence between horizontal and sectoral rules, particularly in areas such as data sharing, cybersecurity, AI and digital identity.
To ensure coherence and proportionality across the EU’s horizontal digital agenda, the EACB puts forward the following recommendations:
- In the context of the horizontal data acquis, the EACB strongly recommends reducing duplication and inconsistencies between horizontal data rules before introducing additional sector-specific requirements, such as FiDA. Legal certainty on how horizontal rules interact with voluntary sectoral data-sharing regimes is essential, and a proper balance must be struck between establishing horizontal standards and allowing market-driven initiatives to evolve, rather than imposing prescriptive data-sharing schemes on the financial sector.
- Calls for streamlined and harmonised incident reporting in the area of cybersecurity and a proportionate, innovation-friendly approach to the implementation of the AI Act.
- Reaffirms the importance of legal certainty and technical readiness in the rollout of the European Digital Identity Wallets, to ensure that co-operative banks can continue providing secure and efficient services to their customers.
Reducing duplication and legal uncertainty is essential to enable cooperative banks to focus on serving their customers and investing in digital transformation, rather than being burdened by unclear and overlapping compliance obligations.