Vienna: A founder who wants to sell across Europe still meets 27 versions of nearly everything, from company registration to insolvency rules, and that friction has become the target of the Union’s competitiveness drive. At the centre of the effort sits a proposed 28th regime, an optional EU-wide corporate framework that would let a company operate under a single set of rules rather than stitching together national ones.

The idea, sometimes branded EU Inc, is deliberately ambitious. Under the outline floated by the Commission president, a firm could register digitally within roughly 48 hours and then run under the same legal conditions in every member state. For fast-growing technology companies that today spend scarce time and money navigating divergent regimes, a common rulebook promises to turn the single market from an aspiration into something closer to a genuine home base.

The push is part of a wider simplification campaign that has gathered pace since early 2025. Between then and June, the Commission put forward a dozen so-called omnibus packages that bundle reforms across many laws at once, which it estimates will cut recurring administrative costs by around 14 billion euros. Co-legislators have also agreed a first strand aimed at helping mid-sized firms, the companies that outgrow small-business exemptions but lack the compliance departments of large corporations.

Behind the activity lies a diagnosis made most forcefully in the Draghi report on European competitiveness, which argued that fragmentation and regulatory drag are quietly starving the continent of scale and investment. The remedy on offer is less about grand new spending than about removing self-imposed barriers, so that capital, talent and firms can move as freely inside Europe as its rhetoric has long promised.

Not everyone is convinced the cutting is wise. Trade unions and some lawmakers warn that simplification can shade into deregulation, thinning out protections on the environment, workers and consumers under the banner of efficiency. The Commission insists it is trimming duplication and reporting burdens rather than lowering standards, but the line between the two will be fought over clause by clause.

The 28th regime and its accompanying packages must still clear Parliament and the member states, where national interests and legal traditions rarely yield easily. Should they survive that gauntlet, the payoff would be a market where launching and scaling a business no longer means learning the rules 27 times over. For now, Europe’s founders are watching, and waiting, to see whether the promise turns into law.