Addressees

These Guidelines are addressed to competent authorities as defined in points (i), (vi) and (viii) of Article 4(2) of Regulation (EU) No 1093/2010 and in Article 3(1), point (35)(a) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114.

These Guidelines are also addressed to financial institutions as defined in Article 4(1) of Regulation No 1093/2010 that are institutions as defined in point (3) of Article 4(1) of Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 (CRR), third-country branches, as defined in point (1) of Article 47(3) of Directive 2013/36/EU, investment firms as defined in point (1) of Article 4(1) of Directive (EU) 2014/65 (MiFID II) with the exception of small and non-interconnected investment firms under Article 12(1) of Regulation (EU) 2019/2033, payment institutions as defined in Article 4(4) of Directive (EU) 2015/2336, electronic money institutions within the meaning of Directive 2009/110/EC and, issuers of asset referenced tokens (ARTs) as defined in Article 3(1), point 10 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 and creditors as defined in point (2) of Article 4 of Directive 2014/17/EU (MCD) (²⁵ ) which are financial institutions referred to in this paragraph. In line with Article 3(3) of Directive 2013/36/EU, these Guidelines are also addressed to financial holding companies and mixed financial holding companies that have been granted approval in accordance with Article 21a(1) of that Directive. For the purposes of these Guidelines, entities referred to in this paragraph should collectively be referred to as ‘financial entities’ .

²⁵ Directive 2014/17/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 February 2014 on credit agreements for consumers relating to residential immovable property and amending Directives 2008/48/EC and 2013/36/EU and Regulation (EU) No 1093/2010 (OJ L 60, 28.2.2014, pp. 34 – 85, ELI: http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2014/17/oj).

For EU branches of third country credit institutions (third country branches) within the meaning of Article 47 of Directive 2013/36/EU, these Guidelines should be read in conjunction with the EBA Guidelines on internal governance under Directive 2013/36/EU. As third-country branches do not have the legal personality and are not considered as separate legal entities from their head undertaking in the third country, a proportionate approach is appropriate for the application of these Guidelines. In this regard, while a written contract between the head undertaking and its EU branch is not possible as they are not legally distinct, the EU branch should have any other arrangement (such as service level arrangement or policies) to formally document the services required by the branch and performed by the head undertaking to enable the branch to comply with these guideline taking into account its specific nature.

Account information service providers that only provide the service in point 8 of Annex I of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 are not included in the scope of application of these Guidelines, in accordance with Article 33 of that Directive.

For the purpose of these Guidelines, any reference to ‘ payment institutions ’ includes ‘ electronic money institutions ’ .