Despite much progress over the past decade, securities settlement in the euro area remains fragmented, inefficient and not very customer-friendly. This is not just a problem for smaller businesses, for which adapting to different conditions in the Member States often entails high costs, but also for the integration and functioning of the single market as a whole.
A striking comparison is often made with the US, an economic area of comparable size: settling a cross-border securities transaction in Europe has been estimated to cost at least ten times as much as in the US!