Central Bank’s Derville Rowland eyes top role in EU’s new anti-money laundering agency

Central Bank deputy governor Derville Rowland is planning to throw her hat into the ring for a key role at the EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) in Frankfurt, according to sources.
Ms Rowland has recently made her ambitions clear within the bank as well as to a number of members of the European Parliament (MEP) that she has met in recent weeks in the normal course of her work, according to sources.
These include Billy Kelleher MEP, who is a member of the European Parliament’s committee on economic and monetary affairs, and Regina Doherty MEP, a substitute member of the same influential group, the sources said. The committee may, on behalf of the parliament, end up interviewing a shortlist of candidates that the European Commission draws up for the AMLA board.
The commission advertised at the start of this month for parties interested in the five full-time executive board positions on AMLA to submit applications by September 27th.
A spokeswoman for the Central Bank declined to comment, as did Mr Kelleher and Ms Doherty. Efforts to secure comment from Ms Rowland were unsuccessful.
Ireland had bid to host AMLA but lost out to Germany’s financial capital in February. The agency is on track to begin most of its activities by the middle of next year and have more than 400 employees by 2027.
Ms Rowland, a barrister by background and employee of the Central Bank for the past two decades, is one of three deputy governors of the organisation, standing over the areas of consumer and investor protection.
Another of the deputy governors, Sharon Donnery, is set to depart the Central Bank later this year to take up a board position at the European Central Bank’s banking supervisory arm.
Ms Rowland has developed a high profile domestically in recent years overseeing the Central Bank’s tracker mortgage examination and subsequent enforcement actions against the country’s banks. This resulted in seven lenders being fined a combined €279 million for their roles in the overcharging scandal.
She is also ultimately responsible for the Central Bank’s role as competent authority in Ireland for the monitoring and supervision of financial companies’ compliance with EU laws covering anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism.
Ms Rowland’s plan to apply for one of the AMLA executive roles comes at time when members of the Oireachtas finance committee are preparing to grill Central Bank officials on October 9th, over its plans to overhaul how it carries out its consumer protection function.
This will see the regulator disband its standalone consumer protection unit in January and disperse its functions among arms of the organisation that supervise various areas, from banks and insurers to investment firms.
Central Bank governor Gabriel Makhlouf defended the shake-up in a letter to Minster for Finance Jack Chambers this week, insisting that the bank is “not discontinuing our focus on consumer protection”.
“Currently, separate directors undertake supervisory activities for consumer protection, prudential regulation, market supervision and tackling money laundering (among other things),” he wrote. “We are moving to an integrated framework where directors with oversight of banks, insurance companies and capital markets will be responsible for the supervision of all the functions in their respective sectors. Each director will have explicit responsibility for consumer protection in their role.”
Mr Makhlouf added that the focus on consumer protection at senior level will not change, with Ms Rowland continuing to have consumer protection at the core of her functions.