Next CMU: Rapport remis à Bruno Le Maire, Olaf Scholz, Wopke Hoekstra et à la présidence Finlandaise

Savings and Sustainable Investment Union

The Next CMU High-Level Group

Report to Ministers and presented to the Finnish Presidency

October 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Next CMU High-Level Expert Group (“Next CMU Group”) is composed of high-level experts from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland and Sweden and reflects various parts of capital markets with public, private and academic experience. The task put by the Ministers to the Next CMU Group is to analyse, with a “fresh eye”, the EU’s market-based financing capacity five years after the launch of the Capital Markets Union (“CMU”) and to make appropriate recommendations. An initial approach was presented at the informal ECOFIN on the 13th of September 2019 at the invitation of the Finnish Presidency. The overall feeling of the Next CMU Group is that, since the financial crisis, the financial sector has not yet fully regained citizens trust and that the purpose of the CMU project should be better articulated and more widely spread. Accordingly, the Next CMU Group proposes a priority shift. From a first phase of the CMU that focused on revitalizing EUs’ capital market ecosystem, it recommends that the new phase gives priority to responses to citizens’ needs and to the investment in the real, digital and sustainable EU economy. People, sustainability and digitalization are the three priorities of the new European Commission. Should political leaders of the three Institutions wish to widely signal such new orientation they could even consider changing the name of the CMU. This would make the purpose of such Union clearer for citizens and the wider economy. The Next CMU Group proposes the following new name: Savings and Sustainable Investment Union. Within the current geopolitical, social and economic context, the Next CMU Group invites political leaders to focus on two EU major objectives: 1. Adopting and promoting a capital market that offers saving products to serve citizens’ needs and that allocates capital to value creating investments in the real, innovating and sustainable economy. 2. Building/strengthening an integrated, competitive, deep and liquid European Capital Market, to maintain the EU as one of the top 2 financial centres of the world. To do so, the Next CMU Group has reached the conclusion that strong and determined political action on an EU and national level should focus on four capital market components, where significant progress can be achieved and drive the entire process to create a deeper and more robust capital market for the EU. The Next CMU Group unanimously recommends the Union to concentrate on the following four Absolute Priorities, for which twenty Transformational Recommendations have been identified, adopted as priorities that should guide any new initiative and/or be a test against which all decisions should be measured at political level: 

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