The eurozone’s banking supervisor is on a mission to get more powers to ensure the upper echelons of banks are up to the job of running big financial institutions in the modern age.

Under European Union law, members of both executive and supervisory boards across the eurozone’s banks have to be judged “fit and proper” by regulatory authorities — and for the 118 most “significant” (i.e., largest) banks of the monetary union, that authority is the European Central Bank’s so-called single supervisory mechanism (SSM).