Government appoints Gabriel Bernardino to lead the insurance and pensions supervisor
The Council of Ministers on Thursday nominated the mathematician, who used to be president of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA).
Gabriel Bernardino will be the next chairman of the Insurance and Pension Funds Supervisory Authority (ASF), it was announced this Thursday at the end of the Council of Ministers. Margarida Corrêa de Aguiar’s successor led the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and was later chairman of the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (CMVM), but left prematurely for health reasons. His name was approved by the Council of Ministers this morning, at the same time as that of Mário Centeno’s successor at the Bank of Portugal.
Margarida Corrêa de Aguiar’s mandate had already ended and a decision by the Minister of Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, was awaited, as at the Bank of Portugal. Last April, ASF officially had two new board members: Rui Nuno Baleiras, as vice-president, and Maria Paula dos Reis Vaz Freire. Their terms of office are six years and five years and six months respectively, non-renewable.
He is currently a consultant to the World Bank and is taking over the presidency of ASF at a time when the consequences of the ‘right to be forgotten’, the creation of the Seismic or Catastrophe Fund and the future of Open Insurance, which will revolutionise the insurance value chain, are being discussed.
A fan of long-term savings and retirement products, he is aware of the difficulties of future financing of Portuguese social security to ensure the current level of pension payments. At the same time, he has studied in depth the development of pillars II and III — company pensions and private pensions — within the scope of the Solvency II regulation, which he built while president of EIOPA.
The government’s plans for this area of supplementary pensions parallel to public social security may now have a favoured interlocutor. Gabriel Bernardino recently stated publicly that “the investment strategy of the FEFSS (Social Security Financial Equilibrium Fund) is not compatible with a long-term perspective”. “We need to change the FEFSS investment policy”, he concluded at the time.
