Policy Focused Debate

📅 01 July 2026

🕔 From 08:00 to 09:30 (registration and breakfast at 07:30)

📍 Sofitel Brussels Europe Hotel, Place Jourdan 1, 1040, Brussels

Concept

Europe is at a crossroads. After losing ground to its main economic competitors for more than two decades, the EU urgently needs to take action to restore its competitiveness in order to preserve its social model and values, to reduce its dependencies in an increasingly complex and uncertain geopolitical environment, and to succeed in achieving the green, digital, and demographic transitions. This, in turn, will require massive investments over the coming years.

To respond to those existential threats, the von der Leyen II Commission has made restoring the EU's competitiveness a central objective of its mandate. Building on the recommendations of the Draghi and Letta reports, it defined an ambitious action plan, known as the Competitiveness Compass, to reignite Europe’s economy and unleash growth, including by simplifying existing regulations and removing outstanding barriers in the Single Market. At the core of this competitiveness push lies the Savings and Investments Union (SIU) agenda, which aims to channel private capital and savings into investments to finance the EU’s strategic priorities.

The Market Integration and Supervision Package (MISP), presented by the Commission on 4 December 2025, is critical to the success of the SIU Strategy. It seeks to ease investors’ access to wider investment opportunities and facilitate the cross-border distribution of capital within the EU by removing existing barriers and boosting scale to make EU financial markets more competitive. In practice, the MISP consists of a Master Regulation and a Master Directive amending 19 pieces of financial services legislation, mainly targeting trading, post-trading, asset management and ESMA supervisory powers, as well as proposing a revamped DLT Pilot Regime to foster innovation in capital markets.

Concerning asset management specifically, the package seeks to reduce regulatory fragmentation across Member States by promoting a more harmonised application of EU rules governing funds and asset managers, moving closer to a genuine single rule book. It aims to facilitate cross-border fund management and distribution by removing operational and legal barriers that limit firms’ ability to scale across the EU. In addition, the package seeks to strengthen supervisory convergence through more consistent oversight practices and coordination at EU level. Overall, these measures are intended to boost the competitiveness and scalability of the EU asset management industry while supporting more integrated and efficient capital markets.

To achieve these goals, the key asset-management related provisions include:​​​​​​

• Harmonising definitions across key asset management Directives (UCITS, AIFMD, and CBDFR) to reduce national interpretation discrepancies, thus allowing funds to comply more easily;
• Introducing standardised forms, templates, and timelines across competent authorities for the purposes of authorisation of a fund;
• Moving all cross-border marketing requirements under UCITS and AIFMD to the Cross-Border Distribution of Funds Regulation (CBDFR), while also removing powers from the host member state’s NCA;
• Inserting identical amendments to UCITS and AIFMD to streamline provisions related to cross-border passporting procedures, such as timeline and notification periods between host and home NCAs;
• Including a new definition of “EU group of the management company and AIFMs”, excluding intra-group functions from the concept of delegation;
• Enhancing ESMA’s supervisory powers upon large UCITS and AIFs groups (exceeding €300 billion in net assets value and meeting cross-border criteria), and cross-border operations of investment funds with the aim to tackle differentiated supervisory approaches between NCAs;
• Introducing a harmonised depositary services passport for both UCITS and AIFs, allowing asset managers to appoint a depositary in a Member State other than their home Member State.

Don't miss this opportunity to be part of the conversation. We look forward to welcoming you!

This event is reserved for EPFSF members and EU institutions staff. For more information and registration, contact us at secretariat@epfsf.org