Opening keynote at Financing Europe 2026 conference on 12 May 2026
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am delighted to have been invited here this morning to discuss EU financial integration.
As many of you will know, it is a topic that is very close to my heart – even if it has been close to my heart for more than 30 years!
I believed it was a “need to have” way back then.
And I believe it is even more of a “need to have” now.
So what ‑ if anything – I hear you say is different this time?
The answer is the context.
Today, we are negotiating our way through a particularly turbulent time in the EU’s history.
We face a persistent problem of low economic growth, a hotly contested innovation race, a generational challenge of demographic change and a highly unpredictable geopolitical environment.
There are wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which are testing old certainties about our security architecture and exposing excessive economic dependencies that have developed over decades.
In responding to such a worrying set of developments, reinforcing the EU economy must be a priority.
We cannot be geopolitically secure, if we are not geoeconomically strong.
And, if we are to be geoeconomically strong, we must become more competitive internationally.
It is this context ‑ where boosting economic competitiveness has become a matter of survival ‑ that we must see our latest effort to develop an integrated EU financial system.
The many trade‑offs in integrating 27 national financial systems remain the same.
But the costs of not making those trade‑offs have become greater and more self‑evident.
The savings and investments union ‑ SIU – is the EU’s latest effort to build an integrate financial system.
It provides a path to facilitate a deeper, more efficient and integrated capital markets and banking sector.
In this way, it can enhance the availability and accessibility of financing across the EU, channelling our abundant savings to the most productive investment.
Member States and the European Parliament have expressed support for the goals of the SIU.
We have European Council conclusions calling for ambitious and urgent progress.
More recently, we have the “one Europe, one market” roadmap.
The roadmap is an inter‑institutional agreement between the European Council, the European Parliament and the Commission, which ‑ among other commitments ‑ aims to have the main legislative proposals of the SIU agreed rapidly.
So, the SIU strategy is without doubt a shared commitment.
Since March of last year, the Commission has been working hard to develop ambitious proposals on the actions to be included in the SIU strategy.
Implementing the SIU strategy requires a range of policy measures, affecting various dimensions of the EU’s financial system.
We have begun with capital markets.
The actions regarding capital markets can be grouped under four headings: citizens and savings, investments and financing, market integration and supervision.
These actions are sector‑neutral by nature.
Capital markets work best when private investors allocate capital where it makes most economic sense.
But they are particularly likely to translate into more and better financing for “strategic” sectors like deep tech, biotech, cleantech and defence.
The measures on “citizens and savings” aim at incentivising EU citizens to invest in capital markets as a means to simultaneously boost their returns and finance economic growth.
To this end, we came forward with a Commission Recommendation for Savings and Investment Accounts (SIA) and an EU financial literacy strategy.
We adopted a comprehensive package on supplementary pensions, including both non‑legislative and legislative measures, with a view to helping citizens secure adequate income in retirement through stronger supplementary pensions.
The SIU measures on “investment and financing” aim to make it easier for companies to access diversified sources of finance, including across borders in the EU.
In this regard, we adopted the Securitisation Proposal, that simplifies due‑diligence and transparency to revitalise the EU market for securitisation to revive the securitisation market.
We advanced several targeted initiatives encouraging equity investments by institutional investors, fostering the development of venture capital and growth funds and enhancing the exit options of investors in unlisted companies.
These measures aim to facilitate long‑term financing by banks and insurers of the real economy, aligning with the EU strategic priorities.
This year we also plan to review and update the EU Venture Capital Funds (EuVECA) Regulation in the third quarter of 2026.
We intend to use this opportunity to more broadly look into growth capital funds, and to identify and address barriers that hinder smaller and mid‑sized funds from operating efficiently and scaling up.
Which brings me to the other two headings under the SIU strategy for capital markets.
Beyond more equity investment, we are also working to make our capital markets more efficient.
To this end, we came forward with a comprehensive legislative package on market integration and supervision.
As I mentioned earlier, capital‑market fragmentation has been a persistent challenge for the EU.
Our capital markets are underdeveloped, less liquid, and less scalable than international peers.
So, the market integration and supervision package is a key element of the SIU strategy.
It has been constructed on the premise that a single market for capital with large scale will be essential in delivering growth and competitiveness for the EU.
The package aims to remove obstacles to market integration, to cross‑border activities and to the take up of innovation.
It will also simplify rules and reduce burdens.
The package is ambitious and very comprehensive.
It covers those sectors that together provide the essential services which enable intermediation between investors and those seeking finance (trading, post‑trading, and asset management).
It also focuses on innovation that has the potential to deliver further benefit in terms of efficiency in those sectors.
It touches 18 pieces of legislation, with the aim of removing:
o Barriers that prevent financial market actors to grow to scale and operate across borders, by adopting a genuine single rulebook and ensuring effective passporting.
o barriers to interconnection by harmonising and simplifying rules for trading venues, CSDs and asset managers.
o barriers to the take up of DLT‑based innovation with a revised DLT Pilot regime and a modernised post‑trade legislation.
o And barriers to efficient capital market supervision, which means moving to single supervision for the most significant and cross‑border actors in trading, and post‑trading, and for all crypto‑asset service providers, and enhancing our tools for supervisory convergence for the rest, notably the asset management sector.
Finally, as you know, we are also looking at the competitiveness of the banking sector as part of the SIU strategy.
We will publish our report on this in July, and we will take the work forward from there.
In building an integrated banking sector, we again have difficult trade‑offs.
Some of these trade‑offs have recently re‑emerged, while others have been on the agenda for some time.
The recently re‑emerged trade‑offs relate to the balance to be found between output growth and financial resilience in considering the essential role of banks in financing the economy.
Such trade‑offs faded from the policy debate in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis but have become more salient in the context of the debate on EU competitiveness.
There isn’t time to discuss these trade‑offs in detail this morning. But, needless to say, there is legitimacy on both sides of the argument.
Nobody wants the stability of the graveyard.
But, on the other hand, the graveyard is full of past efforts to stimulate economic growth via the financial system at the expense of adequate prudential control.
So, let’s have that debate in a serious way and not pretend that there are obvious solutions in either direction.
The trade‑offs have been aired for longer when it comes to the integration of the EU banking sector and Banking Union.
Again, there is no time this morning to rehearse the arguments in this debate.
Suffice to say that it is now more than a decade since the single rule book, and the single supervisory and resolution frameworks were established as key elements of the Banking Union.
Banking Union functions well today but will not function optimally until all the key elements are in place.
We have failed to reach agreement on these elements in the past.
Time is not on our side.
In wrapping up, let me say that the EU must do better than in the past.
Talking about ambition in the SIU strategy is the easy part.
Now, we must walk the walk.
If we continue to approach capital‑market integration incrementally, we will continue to achieve incremental results, at best.
Such incrementalism would be at odds with the pace of change in our geo‑political and geo‑economic environment.
Success in the SIU strategy will be measured against three standards: speed, ambition and integrity.
Speed, because the world will not wait for us.
Ambition, because our response must be a match to the challenges of our time.
And integrity, because the SIU strategy only delivers if it is seen as a coherent whole. If we pull it apart into isolated elements, we weaken its impact.
Of course, the SIU is by no means the only reform effort required by Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta.
But both recognise that financial‑system reform will be key to broader efforts to boost EU competitiveness.
The SIU can be a break with the past.
It is more ambitious in its objectives for retail investment, for institutional investment and for capital and banking market integration.
It is a mix of legislative and non‑legislative policy actions, reflecting the fact that EU competence is constrained for many of the actions needed, for example, in taxation or pension reform. But the Member States may find these non‑legislative actions to be powerful reform tools.
The EU financial system has fallen a long way behind its US counterpart and risks falling behind other up and coming markets.
The fact is no EU member state has a domestic financial system big enough to be a relevant global economic player today.
So, those of us in favour of integration need to make the argument more clearly, more cogently, than ever.
And the SIU strategy is a chance to do just that.
Let me finish my remarks – as always ‑ by recalling that reforms like the SIU strategy are a shared responsibility of all stakeholders – certainly not only of policymakers.
It is also the responsibility of the private sector.
And we policymakers count on your support to make the SIU a success.
Related links
Savings and investments union
