Three Pillars Finance
The three pillars were the structure of the European Union between 1993 and 2009 - one supranational, two intergovernmental. The Lisbon Treaty folded them into a single legal entity, so strictly speaking nobody offers three pillars any more, the EU included. We certainly do not. Vehicles and equipment, on the other hand, we can do.
- Same-day approvals available
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About the pillars
This is one of those phrases that means something quite specific if you studied European law, and something rather vaguer if you did not. In our case it means neither, because we are an asset finance broker in New Zealand rather than a constitutional scholar in Brussels.
We arrange loans for cars, utes, trucks, boats and machinery. Treaty architecture is well outside the panel. But since you are here, the short version is below, and the Apply button already has a car loan selected in case you would rather get on with something practical.
Two sets of three pillars, one of them extinct
The Maastricht Treaty gave the European Union a three-pillar structure when it came into force in 1993.
The first pillar was the European Communities - the supranational one, where member states pooled sovereignty and decisions did not require unanimity. The second was the Common Foreign and Security Policy. The third began as Justice and Home Affairs and was later narrowed to police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters. Those two were intergovernmental, meaning states cooperated while keeping their vetoes.
The Lisbon Treaty dismantled the arrangement in December 2009, giving the EU a single legal personality and collapsing the pillars into one structure. So the three pillars are constitutional history rather than a going concern, which leaves us unable to offer something that no longer exists to be offered. A first, even for us.
There is a second set of three pillars, and this one is still standing. Basel III is the international framework that governs how much capital a bank has to hold, and it is built on three of them.
Pillar one sets the minimum capital a bank must hold against its lending, weighted by how risky that lending is. Pillar two is the supervisory review, where a regulator can decide the minimum is not enough for a particular bank. Pillar three is market discipline, which mostly means disclosure - banks publish enough about their risk position that the market can form its own view.
Here is the part that is either interesting or infuriating depending on your temperament. Basel III genuinely does affect your loan. It is part of why a lender prices a secured car loan differently to an unsecured personal loan, and part of why some lenders will write business lending that others will not. It shapes the panel we take your application to.
And there is absolutely nothing you can do with that information. You cannot negotiate with a capital adequacy ratio. It is the rare piece of finance knowledge that is both directly relevant to you and completely unactionable, which is a fairly good description of banking regulation generally.
Pension policy has a set of three pillars too, for what it is worth. We cannot help with those either. Asset finance, happily, remains very much a going concern.
How it works
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