Milan: Asset managers in the Italian financial district run funds sold in fifteen countries and answer to one national regulator. A package now moving through the legislature would change which authority picks up the phone.
The Savings and Investments Union began as a slogan about persuading European households to move money out of deposits and into markets. It has turned into a supervisory reform. The Commission’s market integration and supervision package proposes to centralise oversight at Union level, extending the direct remit of the European Securities and Markets Authority to entities that currently sit with national supervisors, including crypto-asset service providers and significant cross-border market participants.
The logic is straightforward and the politics are not. A fund passported into fifteen markets is supervised by the authority of its home state, which may be small, may compete for that business, and may lack the staff to examine a firm operating at continental scale. Investors in the other fourteen markets rely on a regulator they cannot lobby and did not choose.
National authorities split on the answer. The French markets regulator has argued publicly for an enhanced role for ESMA, framing it as the precondition for a genuine savings and investments union. Others in smaller jurisdictions see supervisory fees leaving their capitals and expertise following, and they say so in Council working parties rather than in press releases.
The retail leg advances on a separate track. The Commission sent ESMA a call for advice in August on retail investor protection, covering value for money in financial instruments, modernised disclosures, suitability and appropriateness tests, marketing communications, the conduct of financial influencers, conflicts of interest and staff competence requirements. That list reads like a diagnosis of why European retail investors underperform their American counterparts on net returns.
Value for money is the sharpest item. Regulators want firms to demonstrate that a product’s charges bear some relation to what it delivers, a test that fund distributors resist because it exposes layered fees that survive on inertia. Finfluencer regulation attracts more headlines and moves less money.
Trilogue negotiations run through 2026, and the package could still shrink. Supervisory centralisation has failed before in European financial legislation, most memorably when the last capital markets union push produced a communication and very little transferred authority. The difference this time is a competitiveness argument: officials now describe fragmented supervision as a drag on growth rather than as a technical inefficiency.
Households remain the point of the exercise. European savers hold enormous sums in low-yielding accounts while European companies complain about the cost of equity. Nothing in a supervisory rulebook changes that on its own. It does determine whether a saver in one country can buy a product from another without wondering which regulator would answer if the product failed.
