EU market integration and efficient supervision

Key Points

The EESC:

• considers that capital markets contribute to capital allocation, and reflect a society's confidence in its own future;
• calls on the co-legislators to support the objectives and measures set out in the European Commission’s proposals and stresses that more ambitious reforms are needed; calls on Member States to commit firmly to capital markets integration and to develop local markets;
• calls on the co-legislators to support central supervision of market infrastructures with significant cross‑border activities; stresses that supervision should deliver identical outcomes across the EU; recommends a clear allocation of responsibilities to reduce duplication and complexity, and coordination to avoid overlapping layers of supervision;
• calls to consider removing further overlapping reporting obligations across sectoral legislation, as well as to ensuring a level playing field during the negotiations; recommends additional to incentivise clearing by fund managers; calls to assess the application of the principle of proportionality under the DORA framework;
• calls for measures to strengthen transparency and reduce liquidity fragmentation in EU equity markets; recommends reinforcing a level playing field among execution mechanisms, including a review of transparency requirements for systematic internalisers (SIs); proposes that ESMA and the UK Financial Conduct Authority work together to resolve data issues; supports the proposed inclusion of SIs in the pre‑trade equity consolidated tape;
• proposes to consider establishing a category of ‘covered cross‑border bonds’ for large private placements under an EU‑level rulebook with ESMA supervision. The EU should draw pragmatic lessons from successful initiatives abroad. A relevant example is the US National Securities Markets Improvement Act (NSMIA);
• welcomes the efforts to facilitate innovation and remove regulatory obstacles to distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based innovation;
• supports the review of the Settlement Finality Directive and the Financial Collateral Directive; recommends assessing proposed changes to the settlement facility in order to ensure that the disapplication of standard insolvency rules is not unduly broadened.

Adoption foreseen for the plenary session of 03/2026