EBF SUSTAINABLE FINANCE ROUNDUP ARTICLE 

ESAP, or the value of giving European solutions to European problems

By Jacopo Borgognone, EBF Policy Adviser

z

BRUSSELS, 20 June 2022

x

In the context of the 2020 Capital Markets Union Action Plan, the European Commission put forward the proposal to establish a European Single Access Point (ESAP) for financial and sustainability-related information reported under EU law. Arguably, this is not just about innovation, but about providing a European solution to an exquisitely European problem: fragmentation along invisible borders. As statistics from the European Commission and IMF also show, European companies and financial entities under EU law report a great deal of information. However, information travels very hardly across borders, and even more hardly to the end user. This in turn reinforces the home-bias of European investors, reducing the share of market-based financing in the EU and thus the specific weight of European capital markets as a whole. A successful ESAP can reverse the trend but -the paper explains- it is key that ESAP does not fall victim to its own ambition. To do so, it is necessary that it ‘starts small, but thinks big’. Here is how.

For more information:

Jacopo Borgognone, Financial Markets – Financing Sustainable Growth j.borgognone@ebf.eu