Activities Report 2025

In 2025, the debate on Europe’s capital markets moved from diagnosis to delivery. With the Savings and Investments Union (SIU) taking centre stage, policymakers are increasingly recognising that competitiveness, strategic autonomy and the green and digital transitions all require deeper, more integrated and more liquid capital markets. Yet fragmentation remains persistent – across market infrastructures, supervisory practices and national savings and investment ecosystems – meaning that progress will depend less on headline announcements and more on sustained implementation, practical design choices and credible enforcement.

For ECMI, this shift reinforces a simple proposition: the SIU will be won or lost on execution. The priority now is to tackle the frictions that continue to prevent scale (e.g. uneven supervision and enforcement, high cross-border operational costs, weak retail participation and trust, market infrastructures that still fragment liquidity along national lines). Europe does not need a new ‘capital markets narrative’; it needs mechanisms that make cross-border activity the default, not the exception. ECMI will continue to support this effort by convening stakeholders around specific reform choices and by translating technical debates into actionable policy options.

We are grateful to ECMI’s members, the Board and Academic Committee for their continued support and strategic guidance, and to our partners and speakers for the quality of engagement throughout the year. As we enter 2026, ECMI will remain focused on the concrete question that now matters most: how to translate the SIU’s ambition into measures that are simple, scalable and credible – so that Europe’s capital markets can finance innovation, resilience and long-term prosperity.

Apostolos Thomadakis, Head of Research, ECMI