Burkhard Balz, born in 1969, has served on the Bundesbank’s Executive Board since Septem-ber 2018 and is responsible for the Directorates General Payments and Settlement Systems, Economic Education and International Central Bank Dialogue. In his responsibility for the Di-rectorate General Payments and Settlement Systems Mr Balz deals with the Bundesbank’s oversight of CCPs and its contribution to the Eurosystem’s market infrastructure (Target 2, Target 2 Securities, Collateral Management and Instant Payments) as well as with the Bun-desbank’s positioning towards innovation and tokenisation in the world of payments. He is a member of the Eurosystem High-Level Task Force on central bank digital currency. Mr Balz is also a Member of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures of the Bank for International Settlements.
From 2009 up until joining the Deutsche Bundesbank, Mr Balz was a Member of the European Parliament, where he sat on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and served as the financial policy spokesman of the European People’s Party (EPP) between 2014 and 2018. In his role as a European Parliament rapporteur, Mr Balz presented reports on, inter alia, Lat-via’s accession to the euro area, the Solvency II Directive and regulations pertaining to the European Supervisory Authorities and the ECB Banking Supervision. The legislative files he covered included the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), the Central Securi-ties Depositories Regulation (CSDR), the revision of the Payments Services Directive (PSD) as well as the Parliament’s position on the CCP Recovery and Resolution Regulation. During his term in the European Parliament Mr Balz was part of the Parliament’s standing delegation to ASEAN and a substitute member of the Parliament’s standing delegation to China. Between 2014 and 2018, he was a member of the EPP Group Bureau. Mr Balz was Chair of the Euro-pean Parliamentary Financial Services Forum from 2014 to 2018 which is composed of finan-cial market stakeholders and high level representatives of the EU Institutions.
Prior to his membership of the European Parliament, Mr Balz held various positions at Com-merzbank AG in Brussels and Hanover, where he most recently headed the department for institutional clients. Mr Balz studied law at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and com-pleted a bank apprenticeship.
