Europe’s fragmentation and the measures needed to overcome it seem to be fodder for a never-ending debate. At the ECSDA Post-trade Conference 2025, five experts took to the stage in the panel titled “Is the post-trade organisation preventing deeper EU markets integration?” to once again tackle the issue.

Midway through the session, Philip Brown broke the tension with a pep talk to the audience. The CEO of Clearstream Banking and head of Global RM, Sales and Client Services at Clearstream believes that Europe should stop beating itself up.

“We’re an easy point of criticism,” he says. “You cannot compare the US with Europe because to make that comparison, you would have to combine the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and all the other markets and ask, ‘how are they doing?’”

“I think it’s very telling, that when the Canadians wanted to choose a collateral management platform for use in their market, they chose a European platform. When the Saudis wanted to do the same, which they did one month ago, they also chose a European platform. Our systems are good. Our technology is really good and we’re delivering on it.”

Apples to pears

“It’s really unfair to compare a market where one equity, NVIDIA, is worth more than the combined market caps of the FTSE, CAC 40 and DAX. It’s a totally different scale of market,” he adds.

“If you have tax advances and a risk-taking population that has been educated financially to invest in equities as long-term investments, you will get an active equity market. You will not get an active equity market by making CSDs merge.”

The audience broke into resounding applause at this point – agreement with Brown’s last line was unanimous.

A different focal point

“The thing that I’m most fearful of is that while we are beating ourselves up for our finances, the world’s changing around us really quickly… We need to think about how we, as a community of market infrastructures, react to that and stop talking about merging – we’re going to be involved in a 10- to 20-year project on that and the world would have moved on by the time we finish,” he urges.

“The question of urgency is not about how we merge quickly. It’s the technological challenge facing us as a continent and as an industry and how we are going to position ourselves there.”

The ECSDA Post-trade Conference 2025, held on 18 November 2025, is hosted by the European Central Securities Depositories Association (ECSDA). Follow our coverage in the coming days on the site.