Battered Bafin’s new boss Branson

IT TOOKUBS Olaf Scholz weeks to persuade Mark Branson to take the job as the next head of BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator. He was offering less pay for a bigger and tougher job than Mr Branson’s current role as boss of Finma, the Swiss financial watchdog. But in the end Germany’s finance minister won over the 52-year-old Briton, who perfectly fits his idea of the next BaFin boss: an outsider with international experience who knows the banking industry. Before joining Finma in 2010, Mr Branson worked for and Credit Suisse.BaFin has been under fire ever since the collapse of Wirecard in June 2020, which followed the Bavarian company’s admission that €1.9bn ($2bn) of funds, nearly a quarter of its balance-sheet, “probably do not exist”. It was again the target of criticism after it took control on March 3rd of Greensill Bank, a Bremen-based lender run by Greensill Capital, an Anglo-Australian provider of supply-chain financing that filed for insolvency a few days later. Critics say BaFin ignored several red flags and took a blinkered view of just the bank rather than the entire Greensill construct (just as it did in the case of Wirecard’s bank).