Memo

Memo to the commissioner responsible for financial services

Publishing date: 04 September 2024
Authors: Silvia Merler Nicolas Véron

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As a result of the extensive regulatory activity triggered by the Great Financial Crisis and the euro-area crisis, the area of financial services has seen a clear shift towards broad-based acceptance of primarily EU-level regulation and, to a lesser extent, also supervision. This shift remains unfinished, however. The two main areas in which greater EU integration is both necessary and achievable in the near term are banking crisis intervention and capital markets supervision. In the newer area of sustainable finance, where EU regulatory activity has been massive over the past five-year term, gaps exist that could limit the effectiveness of the framework in leveraging the power of finance behind the EU’s climate goals.

You should address these issues forcefully, striving for consistency across the whole landscape of EU financial regulation including sustainable finance, and not giving up on completing the banking union.

Key actions:

Capital markets supervision
Push sustainable finance in pursuit of climate goals
Don’t neglect banking union

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About the authors

Silvia Merler

Silvia Merler, an Italian citizen, is the Head of ESG and Policy Research at Algebris Investments.

She joined Bruegel as Affiliate fellow at Bruegel in August 2013. Her main research interests include international macro and financial economics, central banking and EU institutions and policy making.

Before joining Bruegel, she worked as Economic Analyst in DG Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission (ECFIN). There she focused on macro-financial stability as well as financial assistance and stability mechanisms, in particular on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), providing supportive analysis for the policy negotiations.
Nicolas Véron

Nicolas Véron is a senior fellow at Bruegel and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. His research is mostly about financial systems and financial reform around the world, including global financial regulatory initiatives and current developments in the European Union. He was a cofounder of Bruegel starting in 2002, initially focusing on Bruegel’s design, operational start-up and development, then on policy research since 2006-07. He joined the Peterson Institute in 2009 and divides his time between the US and Europe.

Véron has authored or co-authored numerous policy papers that include banking supervision and crisis management, financial reporting, the Eurozone policy framework, and economic nationalism. He has testified repeatedly in front of committees of the European Parliament, national parliaments in several EU member states, and US Congress. His publications also include Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, a book on accounting standards and practices (Cornell University Press, 2006), and several books in French.

His prior experience includes working for Saint-Gobain in Berlin and Rothschilds in Paris in the early 1990s; economic aide to the Prefect in Lille (1995-97); corporate adviser to France’s Labour Minister (1997-2000); and chief financial officer of MultiMania / Lycos France, a publicly-listed online media company (2000-2002). From 2002 to 2009 he also operated an independent Paris-based financial consultancy.

Véron is a board member of the derivatives arm (Global Trade Repository) of the Depositary Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a financial infrastructure company that operates globally on a not-for-profit basis. A French citizen born in 1971, he has a quantitative background as a graduate from Ecole Polytechnique (1992) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (1995). He is trilingual in English, French and Spanish, and has fluent understanding of German and Italian.

In September 2012, Bloomberg Markets included Véron in its second annual 50 Most Influential list with reference to his early advocacy of European banking union.