03 October 2012 6:44am

A European Union advisory panel recommends banks separate their proprietary trading activities from their core business, a practice often described as ring-fencing.

Erkki Liikanen, governor of the Bank of Finland, chaired the panel. However, the European Commission may be in no rush to endorse the proposals, even though they chime with regulatory themes in the UK and the US.

The Liikanen panel proposed that banks establish a separate entity to conduct proprietary trading where trading assets exceed €100 billion or around one fifth of a bank's assets.