In brief
- The plan includes auto-enrolment pensions, tax incentives, and steps toward market integration.
- Oversight changes could give ESMA a role in supervising crypto and cross-border infrastructures.
- The push follows warnings on stalled reforms and comes amid debate over the digital euro.
The European Union is preparing a year-end push to expand pension savings and tighten oversight of markets, with plans that could hand its Paris watchdog new authority over crypto firms.
Speaking at the Eurofi Forum in Copenhagen on Thursday, Financial Services Commissioner Maria Luís Albuquerque said the package will cover pension auto-enrolment, tax incentives for savings, and steps to cut cross-border barriers in trading, alongside a debate over shifting key supervisory powers to the European Securities and Markets Authority.
“We are looking at possible centralized supervision of certain market infrastructures, such as central counterparties, central securities depositories, and trading venues,” Albuquerque said during the forum. “We also see the benefit of more centralized supervision for new and rapidly evolving areas where supervisory capacities need to be up to the task, such as Crypto Asset Service Providers.”
Dubbed the EU’s Savings and Investments Union, the initiative is presented as a long-term project to mobilize household wealth and enhance Europe’s financial autonomy by integrating fragmented markets and expanding retail participation.
Any transfer of powers to ESMA, meanwhile, “would not sideline national authorities,” but instead create a framework for joint oversight that could better manage cross-border risks and ensure consistent enforcement across the bloc, Albuquerque stressed.
Albuquerque’s remarks follow a statement from former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, who warned Tuesday that Europe was “failing to match the speed” of global financial change, a critique that has fueled pressure on Brussels to accelerate long-stalled efforts to deepen its capital markets.
“This is a step in the right direction, for pensions in particular, but meaningful reform requires more than tax incentives,” Robert Boris Mofrad, co-founder of blockchain data storage firm Serenity, told Decrypt. “What is needed is standardized frameworks that actually channel long-term savings into productive assets, including digital ones.” Otherwise, the plans could remain “symbolic rather than structural,” Mofrad said.
The debate over pensions and market reform coincides with Europe's efforts to design a digital euro, as officials weigh whether to issue it on public blockchains like Ethereum or Solana.
This comes amid the U.S.'s leapfrogging other jurisdictions with its first stablecoin law, raising questions about the euro’s competitiveness in global finance.
While Albuquerque did not weigh in on the digital euro debate, she argued that Europe’s competitiveness rests on building deeper capital markets and stronger pension systems that channel long-term savings into the economy.
“Pensions, by their very nature, are long-term. That is why they are such powerful drivers of capital market development,” she said. Albuquerque said she sees Europe’s plan creating “a virtuous cycle of investment, where our citizens can invest in their own futures and in the future of our economy.”
Risks remain, however, if Europe adopts an “overly centralized approach” that “could go against the core fundamentals of blockchain technology and slow innovation,” Serenity's Mofrad said. “The balance to strike is clear, rules-based oversight without stifling Europe’s competitiveness in tokenized assets and digital finance,” he added.
Representatives for the commission did not immediately return Decrypt’s request for comments.