Rosa Lastra, an expert in international financial regulation at Queen Mary University of London, considers that the architecture of banking supervision "has worked poorly in the face of the crisis", and stresses that "the failures were in how the financial system was controlled, not in the who", so that, in her opinion, "changing the who does not fix the how".

During her stay in Pamplona, Professor Lastra explained to the students and professors of the Schools Law and Economics departments of the University of Navarra the shortcomings in banking regulation and supervision that led to the financial crisis of 2008, which convulsed economies around the world and is still plunging European countries, especially those of the Mediterranean arc, into a deep recession.

The expert defines systemic risk as the possibility of a collapse of the financial system as opposed to the possibility of bankruptcies of individual institutions; the risk that the financial difficulties of one institution will spread by "contagion" to others until they affect the financial system as a whole.

Given the evidence that the global financial supervisory architecture prior to the 2008 crisis did not serve to warn of the imminence of collapse, Lastra explained some of the initiatives adopted, including new legislation in the United Kingdom. Designed in part to try to minimize that risk, it "emphasizes judgement-based supervision rather than the creation of a more standardized set of rules".

The essence of the new banking supervision is based on a proactive attitude on the part of the regulator, which must intervene when it considers that an institution's behavior could lead to future risks for it or for the system, even if the institution itself does not agree with agreement. The Degree of interventionism must follow rules of proportionality and justification, but both the political powers and civil society must be more clearly involved if effective regulation is to be achieved, according to its promoters.

Lastra quotation to the economist John Maynard Keynes to explain himself, since in his work 'Proposals for an International Currency (Clearing) Union' (1942), the Briton already warned that "perhaps the most difficult thing is to decide how much should be decided by rule and how much should be left to discretion".

 Rosa Lastra is an international expert in Central Banking and financial regulation. She studied at Harvard with a scholarship Fullbright and also at the London School of Economics. She has advised, among other institutions, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, the House of Lords in Great Britain and the European Central Bank.