Verena Ross struggles to put her finger on the most challenging time in an almost 30-year regulatory career that began in the UK before bringing her to mainland Europe as executive director of the EU’s new markets regulator in 2011, and its chair in 2021.
Was it her earliest days in Paris, when the European Securities and Markets Authority was trying to expand from a 35-person start-up while also shepherding the EU’s markets through an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis?
Or was it when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Ross had to confront the same practical issues as leaders of other organisations, while also trying to make sure that Europe’s markets did not buckle under the most unusual and unpredictable of circumstances?