Financial integration Financial integration is an important part of the Lisbon Agenda and the European Union’s Single Market Program. In particular, among industrial countries the free flow of capital across borders unleashes competitive pressures that reduce the cost of capital and allows for better sharing of risk for consumers and firms. It is therefore the long-standing view of the Eurosystem that financial integration is an important process for the general well-functioning of the European economy. Since its creation in 2002, the ECB-CFS network has featured important pieces of research that further substantiated our conviction in this regard. We have seen more of this since this morning in the present Symposium. One paper adds that the benefits of financial openness through the corporate sector arise particularly from improvements in total factor productivity, rather than through capital accumulation. 1 Another illustrates how cultural factors, such as mutual trust and confidence, matter for the degree of risk sharing even among European regions within the same country. 2 While we have certainly made a lot of important progress in European financial integration over the last decades, not the least through the introduction of the euro, available research also suggests that a lot of benefits in terms of cross-country risk sharing are still to be reaped and therefore further efforts are necessary. 1  Bonfiglioli (2006), International financial integration, productivity and capital accumulation, mimeo., Institut d’Analisi Economica CSIC, July.

This initiative is supplemented by a series of requirements directly applicable to the provision of cryptoasset services, such as bans on the provision and custody of anonymous wallets, greater traceability of ownership changes and an extension of the list of obliged entities to include all crypto-asset service providers. At the European level, the European Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets, or MiCA as it is better known, is a regulatory initiative that seeks to offer a set of uniform rules and a common supervisory architecture to provide legal certainty and appropriate legal protection for crypto-asset users, thereby facilitating the orderly development of this ecosystem. As such, it envisages a range of provisions applicable both to crypto-asset issuers and to service providers. MiCA covers multiple types of crypto-asset service providers. It not only obliges them to obtain the necessary authorisation, but it also sets out various prudential, organisational and transparency requirements, as well as others relating to the safekeeping of clients’ funds, conflicts of interest and outsourcing, depending on the service provider's characteristics. In this respect, MiCA has much in common with the path followed by other jurisdictions, although the level of requirements and granularity included in these obligations is greater. One of the most pioneering aspects of MiCA is its approach to stablecoins, specifically as to the composition and management of their reserve assets and the conditions associated with their issuance. 31  FATF (2012), “International Standards on Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism & Proliferation”, available at: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/recommendations/pdfs/FATF%20Recommendations%202012.pdf.