The Commission published in September 2020 a new action plan for completing the Capital Markets Union (CMU), a key initiative launched in 2015 aiming to develop and further integrate capital markets in the EU in order to diversify the funding of EU enterprises and provide investors with better investment opportunities. These objectives are all the more relevant with the increased funding needed for supporting the post-Covid recovery, the EU Green Deal and digital transformation, which cannot be provided solely through public funds and need mobilising significant private investments.

The new CMU action plan completes two previous action plans, which were adopted in 2015 and 2017 and have been mostly implemented and builds on the recommendations of the CMU High Level Forum, a public / private working group put in place by the Commission at the end of 2019 to make proposals for relaunching the CMU.

The December 2020 ECOFIN welcomed the proposals of the new CMU action plan and put a priority on the actions concerning the access to capital of SMEs, the development of retail investment and certain measures likely to encourage the cross-border integration of capital markets (post-trading and supervisory convergence).