The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority published today a follow-up to its approach to simplification. The new note takes stock of the progress made so far and sets out EIOPA's ongoing efforts and future plans to make regulation simpler and reduce unnecessary complexity across Europe's insurance and occupational pensions sectors—without compromising financial stability, consumer protection standards, or supervisors' ability to oversee the market.
Against a rapidly evolving geopolitical, economic, and technological landscape, Europe increasingly needs to respond with greater unity, agility, and speed. Given that a well-functioning Single Market—including in financial services—is central to the continent's growth, resilience, and competitiveness, Europe has a shared interest in developing regulatory and supervisory frameworks that are simpler, more efficient, and more focused on principles and outcomes.
EIOPA considers that, within the EU's unique setup, regulatory simplification must be guided by a European perspective. This means placing long-term collective interests above national specificities, supporting convergent rules and supervisory practices across the EU, and avoiding unnecessary divergence or fragmentation within the Single Market.
Today’s update reaffirms EIOPA’s commitment to reducing administrative burden in a constructive and balanced way. It also stresses that simplification should become a continuous, long-term guiding principle of regulatory and supervisory work, rather than a one-off exercise.
Simplification measures already taken
The note lists EIOPA’s recent simplification efforts and outlines how EIOPA intends to implement further streamlining and burden reduction measures across all areas of its work. Key actions already taken include:
- cutting quarterly reporting templates by 26% and annual reporting templates by 30% for solo undertakings under the revised Solvency II Directive, with even more substantial reductions for ‘small and non-complex undertakings’ (36% and 44%, respectively);
- reviewing 25 sets of Guidelines and shortening them by around a third, while also adopting a simplification-driven approach to new Level 3 measures, ensuring they are introduced only where there is a clear supervisory need;
- implementing a new proportionality framework under Solvency II;
- making greater use of existing reported data where possible instead of creating new reporting obligations;
- making bottom-up stress tests less frequent and strengthening top-down analytical capabilities;
- simplifying EIOPA’s internal working group structure, to bring efficiency and closer coordination with national supervisors.
The way forward
Beyond these measures, EIOPA will continue working to ensure coherence between horizontal and sectoral legislation, promote integrated and digital-friendly data reporting that benefits both undertakings and supervisors, and favor outcome-oriented principles for consumer-relevant legislation instead of prescriptive processes and extensive documentation requirements.
On regulation, EIOPA calls for an earlier and more structured involvement of the authority in the legislative process to support co-legislators in assessing the need, scope and feasibility of technical mandates. Simplifying regulation should also mean paying greater attention to the sequencing of legislative files: where multiple requirements from different pieces of legislation overlap, appropriately phased implementation timelines can help avoid unnecessary operational pressure and complexity. Robust impact assessments should accompany both new legislation and reviews of existing rules to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs and resources required for implementation.
On supervision, EIOPA argues that clear, consistent, and effectively enforced rules are among the strongest drivers of simplification for undertakings across Europe. A more structured dialogue with industry can help identify where complexity and practical obstacles arise and how these can be addressed within the existing legislative framework, including through better application of proportionality and supervisory expectations. Better coordination between supervisors—from the outset of supervisory action, through shared tools and expertise—can further reduce fragmentation and contribute to more predictable and efficient supervision across the Single Market.
- Publication date
- 28 September 2026