Welcome to the next episode in our series of Beyond Brexit podcasts.

Today we're discussing the EU 27 view of Brexit.

I'm Gaynor Bagley, PWC's Head of Corporate Purpose.

On all the previous episodes of these podcasts, we have talked about the impact on UK business of various Brexit scenarios,

but of course the outcome of any negotiation would be on the views of both sides.

Today I'm joined by Ray Taylor of our Corporate Affairs team.

Ray is based in Brussels and his job is to keep us all appraised of EU developments on Brexit and regulatory issues.

Brian Polk, who's a director in our European Financial Service and Regulation team.

And Michael Moore, a former politician who's one of PWC's strategic advisers on Brexit.

Welcome, gentlemen.

Ray, I'm going to start with you.

Can you just give us a bit of a flavour about what is the mood in Brussels as we build

up to the Leaders Summit? I mean obviously we're heading to the summit in the middle of December

and as people would have seen from the press and press reporting this is viewed as being a

very critical time both for the EU 27 and also for the UK,

in that obviously the UK is desperate to get to a decision by the 27 on future progress.

I think it would be fair to say that there are still a number of stumbling blocks that still need to be

resolved between the UK and the 27. One of those is obviously money. The other citizens

rights, we seem to be moving a lot closer to agreement on that, which doesn't mean that

we should have false confidence that that's going to be found,

but most probably of all the three areas, it's the one that we're most probably slightly closer to

agreements on. From an EU 27 side, certainly from over the decade that I've been dealing with

...