What remains sharpest is the afternoon of 11 September 2001. On De Nederlandsche Bank’s financial-markets desk, Jos Heuvelman was working Wall Street hours when colleagues reported the first strike and the team watched the second aircraft hit live. Panic followed: rumours of further planes, frightened staff in Amsterdam’s tallest tower, and contacts lost in the dust. Settlement still had to finish and dollar positions had to close, while Dutch bankers turned to the central bank through the evening and night. Briefly uncertain, he became directive: a field captain, not a general waiting for orders.

Beside that night sit the two Fortis weekends. He was not front-row, yet nationalisation needed every hand. Lehman felt distant at first, though the trouble was sensed before it turned acute. Supervisors, he argues, prevent the last crisis recurring but cannot name the next cause. With cyber risk and artificial intelligence now central, the next shock may be operational. The AFM has long said that markets skate on thin ice which has not broken. Greenspan warned in 1996 of irrational exuberance, proved right only four years later. He cannot say what would puncture prices, or whether they burst or deflate.

On the banking union he is satisfied and impatient. Mergers across borders remain rare and banking is still largely national. ING is large in several countries, yet no major foreign bank has a similarly large place in the Netherlands. Pan-European newcomers such as Revolut may widen support for integration. Stronger supervision has, he thinks, been delivered by the ECB: when US banks ran into trouble, Silicon Valley Bank among them, the European system held up reasonably well. He regrets the missing deposit guarantee, wanting banks able to compete outside the Union. Integration will come by muddling through, slowly and without steps backwards.

Asked what makes a good supervisor, he starts with practical knowledge of institutions, prices and customers, gained through conversation rather than theory. Senior staff must still speak credibly to managers, even where specialists know IT risk better than treasury. Risk-based supervision means choosing what can wait a year, knowing the choice creates risk. Hard indicators are preferable but often missing, so judgement turns on whether someone is part of the solution. He thinks the market sees him as a discussion partner, yet authority needs an iron stock of fines, warnings and refusals. First offence, blame, damage and the public signal all weigh.

The AFM role was, he says, a plain fit for someone who had supervised banks, insurers, pension funds and asset managers and wanted final responsibility. An extra ESMA year, sketched on arrival and confirmed later, is unusual; colleagues will soon notice he no longer decides. He wants supervision more European, able to handle further digitalisation in markets and in its own tools, and present in calls and visits rather than from a tower. High tech, high touch is the AFM line: without a human route, chatbot loops may not be progress. After September 2026 that year is his cooling-off from national cases; part-time oversight could follow.