Who are we?

The European Federation of Financial Services Users (“EuroFinuse”) (formerly European Federation of Investors, in short EuroInvestors) counts more than fifty national and international member and sub-member organisations. In turn those count about four million individual members. EuroFinuse acts as an independent financial expertise centre to the direct benefit of the European financial services users (end-users, consumers, retail investors, etc.) and other stakeholders of the European financial services who are independent from the financial industry.

The organization has recently changed its name (formerly European Federation of Investors, in short EuroInvestors) to better reflect its large scope - other financial services users than “investors” only - and its membership - several member organisations are more involved with other financial services users than “investors”. Nevertheless, the objectives and activities of our organization have not changed.

Since the creation of our organization in 2009 our main objective has been to restore financial services consumers’ confidence. In order to do so, we are focusing on four key priorities:

A better protection of financial services consumers

-fair, clear and comparable information,
-unbiased and competent advice,
-a badly needed EU-wide collective redress scheme,
-the elimination of tax discrimination against EU individual savers and investors,
-and the consistency of financial consumer protection rules and enforcement whatever the financial product/service and whatever the distribution channel

Better transparency, liquidity, integrity, and efficiency of capital markets

The crisis has highlighted the failures of capital markets, especially but not only in the fixed income area. The “reintermediation” of capital markets by the banks should be limited and capital markets must serve primarily the investors and issuers’ interests, before the financial institutions’ ones.

More responsible and more competitive lending

The crisis has demonstrated that banks should get back to their core business of collecting deposits and lending to the real economy, with real competition, and without using central banks’, depositors’ and taxpayers’ money to fund high margin but risky investment and trading activities.

A better governance of financial supervision

The European Authorities should put an end to the imbalance of representation of interests between the providers (the financial industries) and the financial services users and other independent non-industry stakeholders.