Under the European Commission's proposal relating to the VAT treatment of insurance and financial services, the exemptions for those services will, on the basis of objective economic criteria, be linked to the nature of the services and not to the person supplying them. In this article, the author analyses the question of whether the "objective economic criteria", which are derived from case law of the ECJ are workable in the light of the methods of interpretation of the ECJ and, in particular its decision in Tiercé Ladbroke.