Cyprus rescue shows need for bank supervisor: ECB's Coeure

The banking crisis in Cyprus underscores the need to have the European Central Bank act as an independent regulator of banks in Europe, ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said on Tuesday.

"The first lesson is that we need better control of banks," Coeure told Europe 1 radio. "We need an independent European regulator, and that will be the case by mid-2014 and it will be the ECB, and we need to identify problems earlier in the euro zone."

Coeure said Cyprus' banking system had made it a special case and he disagreed with Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselboem's assertion on Monday that the Cyprus bailout represented a new model for resolving banking crises in the bloc.

(Reporting by Catherine Bremer; Editing by Leigh Thomas)