A Brief History of the Institutional Design of Banking Supervision in the Netherlands

This paper describes how banking supervision in the Netherlands has evolved over time. It concentrates on how legal and institutional arrangements and the practice of banking regulation and supervision have responded to developments in the financial environment since the Bank Act of 1948 formally entrusted banking supervision to the Nederlandsche Bank. To put the developments of the last fifty years in a broader perspective, this study also contains a brief history of the Bank and the commercial banking industry in the Netherlands up to 1952. The paper concludes that the changes in financial supervision in the Netherlands have been inspired not by major banking crises, but by the evolving role of banks and by changes in the structure of the financial sector.