Bergamo: The revision of the EU securitisation rules reaches its third trilogue on 29 September, and the small and medium-sized firms of Lombardy have an indirect stake in an argument being conducted in language none of them use. Securitisation, at its plainest, lets a bank move a pool of loans off its own balance sheet and sell the risk to investors, freeing capital to lend again. Europe has been notably bad at it since 2008, originating a fraction of the volume the United States manages relative to the size of its economy, and the Commission has decided that fixing this is a precondition for the savings and investments union it announced in March 2025.
The legislative package landed in mid-2025 and splits across two instruments, an amendment to the Securitisation Regulation itself and a parallel amendment to the Capital Requirements Regulation that governs how much capital a bank must hold against securitisation positions. The Parliament settled its position in plenary on 21 May 2026 after the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee softened several elements of the original draft report. The Council agreed its own mandate earlier. Two trilogues have taken place under the Irish Presidency, which has said it intends to close the file before its term ends on 31 December.
Three disagreements over the EU securitisation rules are doing most of the work. The first concerns what counts as a public securitisation, which determines the weight of disclosure that follows. The Parliament wants the category to capture transactions where the underlying pool is actively managed, in addition to those where a prospectus is required, on the argument that active management is precisely where opacity accumulates. Issuers regard the addition as a drafting trap that will pull private placements into a reporting regime built for listed deals.
The second is a number. Under the UCITS framework, which governs the retail funds most European savers actually hold, there is a limit on how much a fund may invest in securitisations from a single issuer. The Council favours fifty per cent. The Parliament favours twenty. The gap is not a rounding difference but a statement about who the reform is for, and it is the clearest illustration of the tension running through the whole savings and investments union: the Council wants depth in the market, the Parliament wants distance between household money and structured credit.
The third concerns sanctions. The Parliament’s text would halve the maximum administrative penalty applicable to investors who fail their due diligence duties, reflecting a view that the existing regime deters participation without improving behaviour. Supervisors are unenthusiastic, and the European Banking Authority has been careful in its public comments to note that due diligence obligations lose meaning when the consequence of ignoring them is priced as a cost of business.
Running underneath all three is the prudential question, which is where the EU securitisation rules bite hardest on lending capacity. The Commission proposed reducing the capital floors that apply to senior tranches of simple, transparent and standardised transactions, and adjusting the risk-weight formula that many banks say makes European securitisation uneconomic before a single investor is approached. Insurers have a parallel claim under Solvency II. Both sets of changes have supporters inside the Council who would go further than the Commission and opponents who remember why the floors were set where they were.
The Irish Presidency’s timetable assumes a deal in November at the latest, leaving room for legal-linguistic work before the year closes. Nothing in the third trilogue agenda suggests the UCITS number is close to resolution, and files of this kind tend to leave their hardest figure until a single late-night session decides it. For the machine-tool workshops around Bergamo, the outcome will show up years later and indirectly, in whether their regional banks have room on the balance sheet to say yes.
