Central banks around the world have increased interest rates rapidly and significantly in the last 18 months to fight fast-growing inflation. Stricter monetary policy is now biting, and inflation is starting to decrease. Consequently, central banks are now expected to start decreasing rates soon or keeping them higher for longer. 

Higher rates have translated into high-interest margins for banks, although at different extents depending on their funding structure and the heterogeneity of the pass-through in the different European Countries. Now, in anticipation of changes to monetary policy, banks may need to revise their business strategies to maintain the level of profitability reached in the last years.

Chair: Elena Carletti | Professor of Finance and Dean for Research at Bocconi University.

Speaker: Philip Lane | Member of the ECB's Executive Board.

Commentator: Corso Bavagnoli | Managing Director at Lazard.

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Elena Carletti is Professor of Finance and Dean for Research at Bocconi University. Ms Carletti is a member of the Board of Directors of Unicredit Group, where she chairs the Internal Controls and Risk Committee, and a Member of the Expert Group on Bank Supervision for the European Parliament. In addition, she is the director of the Banking and Corporate Finance network and the Research Policy Network on European Financial Architecture at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Ms. Carletti is the founding Director of the Florence School of Banking and Finance at the European University Institute and a past President of the European Finance Association. She has been a member of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) from April 2015 to March 2023 and a member of the Scientific Committee Paolo Baffi Lecture at the Bank of Italy from 2015 to 2021.

Philip R. Lane joined the European Central Bank as a Member of the Executive Board in 2019. He is responsible for the Directorate General Economics and the Directorate General Monetary Policy. Before joining the ECB, he was the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. He has also chaired the Advisory Scientific Committee and Advisory Technical Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board and was Whately Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin. He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, he was awarded a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1995 and was an Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University from 1995 to 1997, before returning to Dublin. In 2001 he was the inaugural recipient of the Bernácer Prize for outstanding contributions to European monetary economics.

Corso Bavagnoli has been a Managing Director at Lazard starting from 2018. Before joining Lazard, Corso chaired the working group mandated by the ECOFIN on NPL, which delivered the ECOFIN NPL Action Plan adopted by the Finance Ministers of the EU in July 2017. Previous to this, he served as Assistant Secretary for the Financial Sector at the French Treasury. From 2009-2012, Corso was an advisor for Economic and Financial Affairs at the Cabinet of the Prime Minister and headed several Offices at the French Shareholding Agency and the French Treasury between 2005 and 2009. Prior to that, Mr Bavagnoli also served as an Inspecteurdes Finances starting in 2002. Corso has a Graduate Degree from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration(ENA), a Graduate Degree from Ecole Nationale Supérieuredes Mines de Paris, and an M.A. in Public Administration – Institut d’Etudes Politiquesde Paris (Sciences Po Paris).