Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Today the College has adopted our Market Integration and Supervision Package – which envisages to remove barriers to a more integrated financial market in the European Union.

Since our first proposal on securitisation in June, we have moved decisively - from financial literacy, and saving and investment accounts, to supplementary pensions, and now market integration and supervision. With every proposal, I have stood here and stressed the political urgency driving our strategy.

Choosing not to act — sticking with the status quo – choosing to tolerate the barriers and fragmentation we know so well, leads only one way — to a Europe that invests too little, grows too slowly, and loses ground geopolitically and economically. That is not a path the Europeans or Europe can afford.

The guiding principle today is pragmatism. This package, and indeed the entire Savings and Investments Union, is about practical reforms that deliver real results for citizens, for companies, and for Europes strategic autonomy.

To boost our competitiveness and achieve sustained economic growth, the EU economy needs to innovate, in many sectors, such as cleantech, biotech, artificial intelligence, and defence – just to name a few.

No public budget can shoulder this scale of investment alone — and bank financing, by the nature of it, is not always suited to supporting early-stage or high-innovation sectors.

What we need are large-scale, deep and liquid capital markets that attract a wide array of investors and allow businesses to find the funding they need, including equity, at lower cost, to grow and compete at the international level.   

But, today, the truth is that EU capital markets are small, fragmented and not competitive enough. This is a drag on our competitiveness and our growth.

 And as we are speaking about lack of scale, sometimes numbers are useful to tell the full story, in this case I think very much so.

In the EU we have more than 300 trading venues, 14 Central Counterparties and 25 authorised Central Securities Depositories and 7 more operated by central banks. In contrast, the US has only 2 CSDs and 8 CCPs.  

And while I want to underline that the SIU is not an attempt to replicate any other market, it can be useful to compare against those who have achieved a more efficient outcome.  

For example, the market capitalisation in EU stock exchanges amounts to 73 percent of GDP, compared to 270 percent in the US.

The number of IPOs in the US has been more than triple the number in the EU over the last decade.

In Europe, we need to focus more on building scale. Scale is a precondition for success in capital markets and scale is of the very essence of the idea of an EU internal market.

A genuine EU capital market is far bigger than the sum of its national parts and can help us mobilise finance for our strategic priorities.

As policymakers, our job now is to reorganise our capital markets to facilitate this monumental investment, not stand in its way.

Todays comprehensive package aims at removing obstacles to the integration of the EU market for financial services. It covers trading, post-trading, and asset management, as well as driving innovation and making our supervisory framework more efficient.

We are proposing to:

  • enhance passporting opportunities for Regulated Markets and Central Securities Depositories – so they can provide their services more easily across the EU.
  • create a ‘Pan-European Market Operator status allowing the operation of several trading venues via a single licence.
  • we are opening up investment opportunities, by streamlining the cross-border distribution of investment funds.
  • And we recognise synergies at group level allowing European entities to build on them in their cross-border activities.

We are keeping simplification and burden reduction in mind when delivering these proposals. Directives are turned into regulations, level 2 measures are streamlined, national options and discretions are limited to avoid gold-plating, the DLT pilot regime is expanded and simplified.

And, furthermore, removing barriers is the most powerful tool we have to simplify and deepen our internal market

This is an ambitious, positive and forward-looking reform, going well beyond quick fixes. This a comprehensive and extensive package addressing around 18 pieces of legislation.

Each of the proposals is part of a coherent approach and are mutually reinforcing.

Only by looking at the whole package one fully understands the breadth of the reform.

When I imagine an integrated, simpler, and more efficient European capital market, I picture a Europe where a financial market participant asking a question in one corner of the Union receives precisely the same answer in the opposite corner.

But today, they dont.

So, our package proposes a more effective way forward, including moving supervision to the European Securities and Markets Authority for significant market infrastructures as well as for crypto-asset service providers, and a more streamlined approach for those entities providing services across the Union.

When it comes to innovation, today we proposed alleviating regulatory obstacles to innovation based on distributed ledger technology, including by amending the DLT pilot regime to relax limits on scope and scale, increasing proportionality and flexibility and providing legal certainty to enable the take up of this technology.

We should bear in mind that integration is not an end in itself. It is a means to build a genuine EU single market for financial services, which makes access to capital markets simpler and more efficient for both investors and businesses.

A more integrated market has benefits for all Member States – both large and small.

In fact, smaller Member States stand to gain a lot, because their firms face higher funding costs, thinner local liquidity and more limited investor bases.

Citizens in smaller Member States will benefit from more choice, lower fees and better returns.

To achieve this, we need to remove all barriers –regulatory, supervisory and political - that fragment the single market.

I began today speaking about pragmatism, and I want to finish there.

Because right now, there is no justification for the fragmented, overly complex patchwork of rules that still shapes Europes financial ecosystem.

Not when we see so clearly what is at stake.

Lets remind ourselves that our current capital-market architecture is the product of past choices. It can be redesigned.

It can be simplified. And it can be improved. Creating a better system is not only possible — it is within our mandate.

Choosing to preserve the status quo may feel comfortable, even harmless. But in reality, the cost of inaction compounds quietly.

And over time, this turns into decline. I would argue such decline is already starting, so theres no time to waste.

We owe it to the next generation and to this Union, to use every tool at our disposal to secure its success. That will be my motivation as I drive this package forward.

I urge the co-legislators to meet this moment with the same clarity of purpose. To approach this reform not with hesitation, but with confidence, optimism, and a shared vision of what a stronger European Union can be.

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.