Digital Finance Strategy for the EU

Key points:

The EESC

• welcomes the Digital Finance Package and finds that the Commission is on the right track to rely on strong European market participants to implement digital financial services.
• however considers that the special role of specialised, regional or/and cooperative or mutual local providers in the financial sector must not be neglected.
• agrees with the Commission to explore setting up an EU digital finance platform and recommends the inclusion of the social partners and civil society representatives in this process.
• considers that in addressing the challenges and risks associated with digital transformation, regulation for technology providers, protecting consumers, granting access to financial services, operational resilience and security of network and information systems are crucial for creating the Digital Single Market for financial services.
• welcomes the GAIA-X project, which is intended to challenge the US and China's dominance in cloud services and aims to achieve EU data sovereignty or data governance through an EU-based cloud network.
• welcomes the Commission's commitment to the "same activity, same risk, same rules" principle that is fundamental and a key to solving the new challenges, including ensuring the same supervision.