Brexit: the Day After

Stéphane BOUJNAH * CEO and Chairman, Managing Board of Euronext. Contact: sboujnah@euronext.com.

The effects of Brexit on the financial markets are still uncertain. Job transfers to the EU are gradual, with very marked effects in Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, even if London still remains the densest financial centre in Europe. But the exit of the City from the EU regulatory framework has profoundly changed the outlook for the evolution of the competitive environment. Things have already changed when it comes to IPOs. To amplify this dynamic, we must now include the Capital Markets Union in a political ambition of strategic autonomy, that is to say direct our projects towards the construction of a genuinely European model with distributed but integrated and highly interconnected financial centres. Faced with the risk of piling up secondary technocratic measures that weaken EU financial players, three priorities must now prevail in the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament: simplification, competitiveness and strategic autonomy.

“Brexit means Brexit” but what does Brexit mean in finance?The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) has put an end to 47 years of a process of increasing integration and convergence. Its first implication has been, to quote the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the National Assembly of France, Jean-Louis Bourlanges (2016), paraphrasing Oscar Wilde: “Whereas marriage is all about solving together problems you did not have separately, the EU and UK now have to solve separately problems that they did not have together.” Indeed, Brexit ended the « natural specialisation » that made the City the tacitly recognised financial centre of the EU. Financial services were one of the areas where cooperation between the UK and the EU was the most mutually beneficial. The City, as the main European financial hub, was subject…