Croatia’s Boris Vujčić has taken over today as vice-president of the European Central Bank (ECB), replacing Spain’s Luis de Guindos, whose eight-year term has ended.
The European Council, made up of European Union heads of state and government, formally appointed Vujčić on March 19 to a non-renewable eight-year term. The move followed approval by the European Parliament and a January nomination by the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers.
Vujčić has led the Croatian National Bank since 2012 and steered his country into the euro in 2023, when it became the currency’s 20th member. He now becomes deputy to ECB President Christine Lagarde on the bank’s six-member Executive Board.
A trained economist and former university professor, Vujčić is regarded as a moderate hawk who has repeatedly warned against lingering inflation.
He is the first person from a country that joined the EU after 2004 to sit on the board. On January 19, the Eurogroup picked him over rivals that included the central bank governors of Finland, Estonia and Latvia and a former Bank of Portugal chief.
De Guindos, who joined the ECB in June 2018, used a press conference on May 27 to reflect on his tenure. He said he was proud that the euro area had suffered no major financial stability incident during his term, although that period had brought difficult moments.
The Spaniard said the bloc’s banks had proved resilient despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump’s return to the United States presidency and the collapse of Credit Suisse.
At the ECB, de Guindos had held responsibility for macroprudential policy, financial stability and risk management.
Looking ahead, he urged the completion of banking union. Although bank supervision had broadly worked well, he said, the euro area’s “monetary union is not complete”.
De Guindos said that while the bloc had single supervision and single resolution, it still lacked a common deposit guarantee, the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), which he called key to the future.
Doubts about such a fund had been understandable 10 or 15 years ago, he said, but the situation was now entirely different. He called on legislators, governments, the European Commission and the European Council to use the current resilience of banks to complete banking union through EDIS, which he described as the project’s third pillar.
