Bart Joosen explores Dutch and European legal issues surrounding the prudential supervision of banks, insurance institutions and other financial companies. Since the onset of the crisis in the financial markets, this area of financial law has drawn an increasing share of interest within the legal disciplines. With the advancing juridification of prudential supervision, there is a clear impetus for establishing a chair in this field. This chair represents an expansion of the Faculty’s Centre for Financial Law.

Joosen will be researching the creation of the European Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), which will see the authority of national institutions responsible for supervising European banks being transferred to the European Central Bank. This process is supported by a Single Rule Book (including the Basel III implementation), which allows for national legislation to be recast in a uniform European legal code for financial markets, and which forms part of an unprecedented effort by the European legislature to harmonise European laws and regulations to the greatest possible extent. Taken together with the uniform strategy for dealing with problem banks, this represents a far-reaching Europeanisation of prudential supervision of the financial sector. At the same time, supervision is becoming increasingly globalised in nature, with a worldwide policy approach for systemically important financial institutions.

Joosen has been a visiting lecturer in the Financial Law course at the UvA’s Faculty of Law since 2010, and as a practising finance lawyer has worked at various firms in Amsterdam since 1992. He is also a former company lawyer at Philips Electronics and lecturer in Business Law at Tilburg University’s Faculty of Law.

In 1998, Joosen obtained his doctorate from Tilburg University with a dissertation titled ‘Company transfers from bankruptcy’ (Overdracht van ondernemingen uit faillissement). He regularly publishes in leading Dutch and international journals and is the co-author of a monograph on securitisation (Securitisatie), which was published as part of the NIBE-SVV’s banking law series. Joosen is also preliminary adviser to the Financial Law Association (Vereniging voor Financieel Recht), whose preliminary advice on ‘The Financial Supervision Act (Wet op het financieel toezicht, or WFT) before and after the European Single Rule Book’ is to be issued in the autumn of 2013. He will shortly be publishing a new book on the prudential supervision of banks and investment firms (Prudentieel toezicht op banken en beleggingsondernemingen).