EU leaders set June test for financial-market integration as faster-track option looms

European leaders in Brussels set a hard June deadline for tangible steps toward linking their capital markets, framing the effort as essential to preserve the bloc's economic clout amid intensifying U.S. and Chinese competition. The push crystallised at an informal summit where senior policymakers said they will judge progress by June; failure to advance could trigger a legal procedure enabling a reduced set of members to implement reforms without unanimous consent. The European Commission, led politically by France and Ursula von der Leyen, has begun to flesh out a political roadmap that would sequence single‑market reforms through to 2028 with clearer timelines and milestones to deepen capital‑market integration. Parallel to that political push, the ECB under Christine Lagarde is drafting a pragmatic technical checklist focused on harmonised crisis‑management tools, strengthened cross‑border banking oversight and better coordination between fiscal and monetary frameworks to make integration operational. The pairing of a political roadmap and an ECB technical package is intended to separate politically sensitive items from deliverable regulatory and supervisory measures, lowering implementation risk and market uncertainty. Industry voices added urgency: eight regulated digital‑asset firms publicly urged Brussels to broaden and accelerate its distributed‑ledger pilot framework, warning that restrictive permitted asset lists, a low transaction cap and a six‑year sunset on licences could push tokenised capital‑market activity to U.S. rails. The firms proposed raising pilot transaction capacity toward a €100–150 billion band, expanding eligible asset classes and removing the time‑limited licence ceiling to avoid migration and allow ecosystems to scale. Diplomats outside the core talks warned that a smaller coalition could fray the political unity the EU relies on for common foreign and trade policies, and sceptics stressed that differentiated integration risks complicating EU‑wide rulemaking. Proponents point to existing multi‑speed precedents across the bloc and argue that an initial core of six large economies, within a minimum enhanced‑cooperation group of nine, could deliver early wins and create momentum. Economists and lawyers caution that technical harmonisation — rules on investor protection, supervisory discretion, taxation and settlement finality for tokenised assets — will be as difficult as the political decision to proceed. The coming months will test whether a fixed timetable, paired technical work from the ECB and targeted regulatory fixes for tokenisation can overcome entrenched national protections and professional lobbying to produce a more integrated, liquid European capital market architecture.