Hello and welcome to another M-Lex podcast. I'm Sam Wilkin, Brussels news editor, and today we're going to talk about the Capital Markets Union. First proposed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker four years ago, the Union aims to create a borderless market for companies to tap investors for money, in theory, making

European finance much more efficient. The financial services industry was enthusiastic at first,

but it's hard to find much excitement now. What went wrong and how could it be brought back to life?

Here to explain it all is John Riga, our financial services reporter here in Brussels.

Hello, John.

Hello.

John, start us off with just an explanation of what exactly the capital markets union is and what's inside it.

It's a big name, isn't it? It's a grand name.

For a commission that had ambitions to be big on big things and small things,

this is more like a big name for a lot of small things. It really was a grab bag of scattershot measures, usually small bore tweaks to

existing rules such as for prospectuses, the documents that you produce for securities offerings,

to streamline some of these things to try to revive securitization,

which was the much discredited form of structured finance that helped to give rise to the last

financial crisis. So a lot of small measures like this captured under sort of a big overarching

banner. And yeah, you're absolutely right.

It sounds like a big thing.

It's very similar language to, for example, the customs union, which is creating so much

controversy around Brexit now, you know, the digital single market.

Even if the ambition is there, it's not achieved nearly as much as they perhaps set out.

What have they achieved so far?

So far it's been a very mixed bag,

to be honest. I think it's only three of the 13 original proposals have actually made it into

...