A panel at A-Team’s Group’s TradingTech Summit London 2026 offered a broadly supportive but clear-eyed assessment of the EU’s Savings and Investment Union (SIU) package, welcoming the shift toward a competitiveness agenda but warning the reforms risk falling short without bolder action on post-trade interoperability, data quality and regulatory simplification.
The session, “The Evolution of Markets,” was moderated by Scott Charity, Head of Market Structure at Berenberg and Co-Chair of the FIX Community’s Global Steering Committee. Panellists were Laetitia Visconti, Head of Market Structure at Aquis Exchange; Virginie Saade, Managing Director and Head of Government & Regulatory Policy, EMEA, at Citadel LLC; and Simon Gallagher, CEO of Euronext London.A welcome shift, but what’s missing?
Panellists agreed the SIU represents a genuine shift in European policymaking. One described it as the first time the EU has looked outward and asked how to make itself competitive on a global stage. The influence of the Draghi and Letta reports was cited as evidence that the urgency around competitiveness is finally being taken seriously.
However, the consensus was that the package’s ambitions outstrip its specifics on the trading side. One panellist framed the core issue not as what is good or bad in the proposals, but what is missing – particularly around transparency, innovation flexibility and the removal of constraints such as dark trading caps that the UK has already abandoned. The FCA’s growing influence over EU legislative thinking was noted, with policymakers increasingly matching UK regulatory moves out of concern over volume migration.Single supervision: ambition meets reality
The proposal to expand ESMA’s mandate drew the most nuanced debate. Panellists acknowledged the potential benefits: a single regulatory vision, reduced gold-plating across jurisdictions, and the ability for exchanges to passport regulatory status across borders rather than navigating separate national approvals. One noted that the duplicative fees and administrative overhead of operating across multiple European markets grows exponentially with each new jurisdiction.
But the proposed dual-hat model – where ESMA oversees high-level supervisory policy while local regulators retain market abuse monitoring – raised concerns. One speaker warned this could increase costs rather than reduce them, with day-to-day market oversight becoming disconnected from institutional approvals. At least three national regulators were described as “violently opposed” to the changes, though the proposal to replace ESMA’s single chair with a college of five supervisors was cited as a politically astute move to build consensus.
Post-trade: the hidden tax on returns
The panel’s strongest consensus emerged around post-trade reform. One panellist framed every operational friction in European clearing and settlement as a direct tax on investor returns – a particularly pointed observation given renewed international interest in European markets driven by geopolitical uncertainty.
The SIU’s proposals to move CSDs onto a common platform and allow CCPs open access to exchange clearing were welcomed as pragmatic first steps, but panellists argued the package falls short by not mandating interoperability between significant CCPs. This was described as the mechanism that would deliver the economic benefits of consolidation without requiring national institutions to disappear. One speaker made the counterintuitive argument that Brexit had inadvertently strengthened the case: when LCH’s equivalence status was under threat, firms built connectivity to alternative CCPs, demonstrating both feasibility and resilience benefits.T+1: validated by US results
The panel expressed strong confidence in the move to T+1 settlement, citing US results as validation – NSCC collateral requirements dropped 30% post-implementation, with freed capital flowing back into markets and corporate bond transaction costs falling 12%. The alignment on an 11 October 2027 go-live date was highlighted as a tangible example of improving UK-EU regulatory cooperation, and a potential template for further coordination.
The main concern was the interaction with Europe’s CSDR penalties regime. Given the region’s fragmented clearing and settlement landscape, panellists warned that operational issues resolvable within a T+2 cycle may prove more difficult in 24 hours, and called for a grace period during the transition.
Consolidated tape: a window and a warning
EuroCTP’s recently announced pricing was welcomed as dramatically cheaper than current market data costs, with panellists hoping the price point will drive greater penetration of European data across global desktops and raise the region’s visibility for issuers.
But the tape’s launch raises an urgent data quality challenge. When on-venue and off-venue activity becomes visible in a single feed, inconsistencies in trade reporting will be exposed. One panellist cited an SI trade in the UK erroneously reported at £2.2 trillion against total daily market volume of roughly £95 billion. While that was corrected on the day, the concern is that smaller errors – £200 million reported instead of £20 million, for example – could go undetected and, if ingested by algorithmic models, create disorderly conditions. Panellists called for a standing mandate for regulators to adjust reporting frameworks dynamically rather than through lengthy legislative cycles.
Breaking the silos
The panel closed with a frank exchange on monopolistic dynamics, with panellists acknowledging that such conditions already exist in market data – where access to an exchange’s order book is inherently bundled with trading – and in closing auctions, where price formation remains entirely concentrated. The argument advanced was that Europe’s vertically integrated silos have structurally inhibited the competitive dynamics seen in the US, where 19 exchanges all trade the same instruments. Breaking those silos through interoperability and open access could allow exchanges to compete cross-border for both trading flow and listings.
The overarching message was that European anxiety around monopoly should give way to building champions capable of competing globally. When an issuer evaluates listing in Europe, the comparison is not Frankfurt versus Amsterdam but both against NASDAQ, the NYSE and exchanges in Asia-Pacific. Making European infrastructure rational, efficient and frictionless is not just a market structure question, the panel concluded, but a strategic imperative for the region’s relevance in global capital markets.
Subscribe to our newsletter
