 Thanks very much, Pat. And thank you for the invitation. It's very nice to be here to talk about the priorities for the Commission and the financial sector. I've decided not to use slides. I'm in a kind of non-slide phase of my presentation of life, so let's see how it works. We've agreed that I will focus my remarks today on the Commission's priorities for 2016. And in this context, I want to discuss three key policy developments, which I think will shape the EU financial sector, not just in 2016, but for years to come. Now, my intention is not to describe to you some kind of abstract vision of the future, because if I'm honest and those of you who know me, I've always been a bit wary of the vision thing. Recently, I was told that I shared this suspicion with the ex-president of the European Council von Rumpoi. Von Rumpoi's reporters have said that if you're having visions, you should see a doctor. And I tend to agree with him. So instead, I'll try to be more pragmatic and I'll present three key policy priorities of the Commission. The first will be completing the banking union. The second will be establishing the capital markets union. And then the third is I want to discuss our efforts to find an appropriate balance between stability and economic growth in implementing the EU regulatory framework for the financial sector. Now, as ever, when you focus on key priorities, other important policy initiatives get amused out. And among the near misses for inclusion in my remarks today are the integration of retail financial services markets, the recovery and resolution of CCPs, bank structural reform, which I'd avoid if I can, the implementation of method two, which is now likely to be a bit slower than we expected, and the implementation of solvency, too. And this is not even to mention the, and get this, the 400 items of secondary legislation reviews and reports that the Commission must adopt to make the primary, or so-called level one, legislation operational. On top of that, I will not cover another important element of the Commission's work. It's the work I brought with me when I joined DGFISMA. And this work includes its country surveillance. And it includes contributions to financial assistance programmes such as Greece and Cyprus, and indeed post-programme surveillance as in Portugal and indeed here in Ireland. Now, I'd be happy to discuss all of these things with you, but I've only got 35 minutes, I think, so I better not push my luck. Let me begin then by discussing the state of play in the Banking Union and how the Commission believes we should move forward from here. Now, you'll no doubt recall that Banking Union was primarily responsible for the Euro crisis. The overriding objective of Banking Union is to reverse the fragmentation, or I should say the refragmentation of the EU banking system, which was a direct consequence of the crisis. And in many ways, I have to say the pre-crisis integration of the EU banking system was based on a fundamental misconception. The misconception was that in spite of the treaty provisions to the contrary, the Nobel Outlaws, there would be a fully mutualised EU response in the events of an EU-wide banking crisis. That was the assumption. When it became clear that this fully mutualised response was not going to materialise, then home bias came back and it came back with a vengeance. And as home bias returned, investor attention increasingly focused on the linkages between banks, balance sheets and the credit wordiness of their national sovereigns. This, you know, in some cases, these linkages evolved into what, you know, rather colourfully became known in Brussels at least as the doom loop. And the doom loop occurred when failing banks undermined the solvency of the national sovereign, which in turn further impaired the credit wordings of the banks to their often extensive holdings of national sovereign debt. So another objective for the Banking Union has been to weaken this so-called bank sovereign nexus. Now the Banking Union targets this nexus through two main channels. The first channel is the regulatory framework or the rulebook. This is the same framework as for the EU as a whole, but it will be applied in a more uniform or more single way within the Banking Union. The single rulebook for the Banking Union ensures essentially that banks are more adequately managed their risk, their credit risk, their market risk, their liquidity risk via the implementation of prudential rules. So that's the CRD4, CRR. It ensures that sovereigns and by that it may mean taxpayers are protected from the cost of banking crisis via the implementation of a single resolution framework. That's the implementation of the BRD. And that deposit insurance is adequate to avert a risk of destabilising bank runs via the amended directive on deposit guarantee schemes. So these are the three parts of the rulebook. The second channel to which the Banking Union targets the bank sovereign nexus is of course via reformed institutional arrangements. These new institutional arrangements pool responsibility for crisis prevention and crisis management at a central level. So we have the single supervisory mechanism which has been operational since the end of 2014, in fact. We have a single resolution mechanism which became fully operational this year and a single resolution fund which also became operational on the 1st of January. And as the Banking Union is primarily response to the euro crisis it's not surprising that euro area member states are automatically members of the Banking Union. But it's important to note that the Banking Union is open to all member states. So while you generally hear Banking Union spoken of as in terms of reinforcing the economic and monetary union in the five presidents report, for example, it's a strong element of that report, we in the commission believe that the Banking Union remains essentially a single market initiative. This is important because it explains why we keep picking a particular legal basis for the Banking Union and why one or two large member states prefer a different basis. Now where are we? Well I think there has been very impressive progress in the very short period of time, particularly if you measure in EU standard units of time because normally something like Banking Union would take 25 years to put in place. The reality is that the concept of Banking Union was put in on the table around 2011 and 2012 and now already we have the various rule books in place. They're adopted, almost all transposed. We have a few member states who are lagging and we're following them to the courts now to sort of hurry them up. We have a single supervisory mechanism, as I said, is in place. We have a single resolution mechanism in place and a single resolution fund in place but here I have to say that this fund will only be built gradually and mutualized gradually over the next eight years and I'll come back to that in a minute. So clearly a lot has been achieved on both the regulatory and institutional fronts and the Banking Union is already functioning and we think it's functioning fairly well. But in the commission's view the Banking Union will not deliver all of its potential benefits while a number of additional elements are not in place. So what are these missing elements? Well I've mentioned already the single resolution fund which will be built up over eight years and mutualized over eight years to a total of around 55 billion. There's a risk however that there will not be adequate resources in this fund to finance a large bank resolution in the early years when the fund is being built. So the member states have agreed to put in place what are called bridge financing arrangements. They are in fact credit lines. They've agreed to these, they're working on them but they're not yet delivered and the commission believes this work needs to be accelerated. These credit lines need to be delivered now. The second missing element is that the commission believes the Banking Union needs a common deposit insurance scheme which would go beyond the arrangements already in the directive that was adopted in 2014. Now to this end the commission has brought forward a legislative proposal on the European deposit insurance scheme or EDIS. Now this proposal was accompanied by a communication which explained how the risk sharing implied by EDIS which is a controversial element of EDIS would be accompanied by measures to reduce the risks that are being shared. I have to say the initial reactions to the EDIS proposal well based on past experience with the DGS directive left us in no doubt that this will be a politically sensitive matter. There are some member states who clearly find this difficult to accept but we believe that this political sensitivity is not a reason to leave the Banking Union incomplete. Third and even more politically sensitive for the member states is the need for a common fiscal backstop for the Banking Union. Now while the construction of Banking Union is predicated on the need to weaken the link between banks and sovereigns, I think we simply cannot assume that no public funding will ever again be needed in relation to banking crisis. The commission believes that such use of public funds must be a last and least resort but to the extent that public funds are ever needed they should be provided on a mutualised basis that is via a common backstop and no longer by national sovereigns. Member states have agreed to work on a common backstop but they have agreed to work on its CNADA in terms of deadlines and we believe that work now should be accelerated and the deadline brought forward. So completing the Banking Union and these three dimensions is a key priority for the commission in 2016 and I think I have to be clear that while we believe the Banking Union can function in its present form and is functioning in its present form you know its impact in terms of achieving its objectives of reintegrating banking systems and breaking this link between banks and sovereigns will be less without these additional elements. So far I mean the responsibility for policy in crisis prevention and management has been pooled but the pooling of any related costs remains predominantly off the table so it remains national. Ultimately this mismatch I think between pooled responsibility for decisions and national responsibility for costs I think raises questions of incentive alignment within the institutional arrangements of the Banking Union. Arrangements where decisions are taken collectively but all the costs of these decisions are handled nationally we think are unlikely to function optimally in the longer term. So we think we have to make progress in these areas. On the other hand we are realistic about the issues involved and putting these missing elements in place will raise legitimate economic and political concerns. These concerns relate to the inevitable moral hazard applied by sharing the costs of risks and how to ensure that the risks that are being shared are being reduced at the same time. These concerns about risk reduction and risk sharing are not unique to the Banking Union and they go to the heart I think of how EMU is going to work in the future and so this need for balance between reducing and sharing risks is set to dominate the debate on completing Banking Union in 2016 we have started already but I think in the years ahead as well. Let me now turn to Capital Markets Union which is another key priority of the Commission. In fact it's so key priority that they inserted it into this incredibly long title that Pat was trying to get across. We are now the DG for financial stability, financial services and the Capital Markets Union otherwise known as FISMA which I understand means something ruled in Greek as did Euro by the way so just so you know. Like the Banking Union the Capital Markets is about developing and integrating the EU financial system but in the non-banking space. Unlike Banking Union the CMU is not primarily a response to the Euro crisis and that's important because we see it then as an EU 28 proposition and not as EU 19 and join as if you like. Those of you who are as old as I am and there's a few they will recall that the Commission had an earlier pre-crisis plan to integrate EU Capital Markets in the first half of the 2000s this was the famous financial services action plan our own European FSAAP. Now unfortunately we were distracted from this task which was already very difficult by the more pressing demands we had with the banking system after 2006 but it's now time to come back and to resume our efforts at Capital Market Development and Integration within the EU. Now while the ultimate objective may be the same as in the 2000s the rationale for Capital Markets Union is a bit different from earlier efforts under the FSAAP. I think it's fair to say in the early 2000s the focus of Capital Market Integration was primarily on efficiency and competition and choice. We were a bit less concerned about stability back then because we believed erroneously as it turned out that the market was taking care of its own risk and that market mechanisms were ensuring that risk was efficiently allocated to those who could manage it best monitor it best but this is not quite how it turned out. So in light of the crisis the rationale for EU Capital Markets Integration and Development has been expanded. Now it's not just about efficiency competition and choice it's also about stability. We believe that by diversifying funding sources and providing more robust forms of cross-border risk sharing Capital Markets Union will also enhance the resilience of the EU financial system and this is an important difference in rationale and adds even more significance I think to the CMU project. It's interesting that before 2000 or so before the crisis the journey was out a bit on whether or not bank based systems or more Capital Market based systems were better. I mean you had the those who said the Capital Market based systems gave you more discipline and you had the other side who argued yes but the patient capital involved in bank based system was much better because it gave you that sort of cushion over the cycle. I think the crisis has kind of brought in the verdict on that. Bank based capital is not so patient not so patient with its cross-border in particular but it's not so patient the patient at all so far as we're concerned CMU is not just about efficiency it's also about stability. Where are we in terms of state of play? Well we adopted the action plan as you know I think you've had Nile here explaining to you on the 30th of September 2015 it comprises 33 actions accompanied by a clear timetable I think the high number of actions because people have said you know 33 a lot of actions a lot of priorities but this I think reflects the fact that the EU capital market is underdeveloped for a lot of reasons. There's no single measure no silver bullet that's going to deliver you an integrated capital market so we have to have a lot of actions chipping away a lot of different places. The action plan I think is clear in terms of the instruments we want to use we are not going to resort to legislation as the default option so we will explore different options non-legislative options as well but where necessary we will use targeted legislation and we'll even use it in some of those difficult areas like insolvency law or securities law where we've had previous efforts not work so well but we are prepared to try again. Now in the six months before we published the action plan we consulted widely we had 700 responses on the web we had extensive discussions with stakeholders in the private public sector and on that basis we grouped the 33 actions that we had in mind into six priorities and I'll go through these priorities very quickly because I'm sure you are many of you are aware of them already and our priorities again try to cover the kind of life cycle of the firm we try to cover all those parts of a capital market that a firm would bump into in its various aspects of its life. So the first priority was to facilitate the financing of individual companies startups and non-listed firms and here we have launched a consultation on how to improve the take-up of European venture capital funds and European social entrepreneurship funds. It's interesting that the average size of an EU venture capital fund is half that of the United States it wears about 60 million and there are about 140 so we leave in less than half and around 90 percent of all EU venture capital investment is concentrated in only eight member states. So you know in short we think European venture capital lacks scale it lacks diversification and it lacks geographical reach so we have to do something to to improve that. The second priority is to make it easier for companies to raise funds on capital markets and here as an example of action we will take we will try to address the current bias in national tax systems that in favors and makes it cheaper to issue debt than to issue equity. I know some people will tell me we've tried this before yes but we're going to try it again in fact may have tried it several times before but we're going to try it again. Another example here is the modernization of the prospectus directive that's already a proposal on the table it's in the council where we're trying to lighten a little bit the burden on prospectus issuance particularly for smaller and medium-sized companies. Third priority would be to promote investment in long-term sustainable projects such as infrastructure here you know we've already adjusted the risk rates on the solvency to the insurance legislation. We recalibrated them to promote investment by insurers and infrastructure. I mean there's an interesting figure here that says insurance companies they tell us have almost 10 trillion euros to invest but they invest less than one percent of that in infrastructure and given the infrastructure needs of the EU which have been put as euro one trillion by some studies we again see this as a sort of win-win possibility. Fourth priority will be to foster retail and institutional investment. We think retailers have to have access to a broader range of financial products with risk return characteristics that suit their specific investment profile. So before the end of this year in 2016 we'll publish a green paper on retail financial services again something that we have done before a very tough area to work in retail financial services because the balance between competition and consumer protection is always difficult to find but we are going to issue another green paper and I think it's worth doing because one of the great changes that has taken place between the work we did before on retail say retail markets and now is technology. If you think of what technology brings we believe there's probably more scope to make progress in integration retail markets now than has ever been. We'll also need to foster institutional investment so pension funds have considerable potential to intermediate savings to productive investment via the capital markets yet the EU does not have a single market for voluntary personal pensions that means that we're missing out on economies of scale we're limiting choice and we're maintaining higher costs so we'll soon begin to examine what exactly is required to establish a single market for a simple personal pension. Again tricky we know there's demand but there are issues around taxation and some labour laws which need to be addressed. We also need to improve the operation of the investment fund industry in the EU I mean we have 36,000 usage funds in the EU that's four times as many as in the United States so again we've a much smaller average size of fund so there may be a need for a more proper European passport system which will allow those funds again to acquire scale increase competition and lower costs. Fifth priority is to restore the capacity of banks to support the economy. Victor Constancio rang me when he saw this and said why are you talking about banks in the capital market union action plan when I told him it was because irrespective of progress in building CMU I and I presume he as well assumes that banks will remain an essential source of funding for a European economy in the longer term. On the other hand the banking sector remains under a lot of pressure after the crisis and this is and we think measures are needed to support banks capacity to support the economy. So in that regard you know the commission has adopted a rather shorter term measure around securitisation. This proposal establishes criteria for simple, transparent and standardised securitisation and implies an amendment of bank capital rules to provide a more appropriate regulatory treatment for the SCS securitisations. We hope if this takes off that we can kind of square the circle of asking banks to deleverage which we think they should but also to lend more and in some cases if I'm honest to lend more to people that we want them to deleverage from. So securitisation for us is a kind of missing piece in the jigsaw even if we accept that securitisation was a central part a central player in the crisis that we've just partly come out of. Sixth priority is the facility cross-border investment. This is standard EU commission stuff. We want to go back to the FSAP agenda to remove some of the long-standing cross-border barriers to the free movement of capital. These include very fundamental barriers like differences in national laws and insolvency, differences in tax treatment of securities. You know progress here will I think inevitably be slower and we will begin with a wide consultation on the key differences between insolvency and early restructuring regimes. People ask me am I why am I more optimistic am I just nidious to be trying to do these things again because they are so difficult and we have so much trouble with them before. I think I am more optimistic than I have been in the past and it's funny enough because of the crisis one of the effects of the crisis was to remove certain taboos. One of those taboos related to bank insolvency. With the BRD we have fundamentally altered laws on bank insolvency. So I think some of these taboos now may be easier to handle in the capital market space. I'm optimistic I'm not necessarily saying I'm right but I'm optimistic that I think people realise from the crisis that some of the things we should have done before the crisis and didn't do became a problem. I think we can use the crisis experience to sort of get a level of ambition which is a bit higher in the member states in these often difficult areas both technically legally and I think also politically difficult. I think we have to be ready within all of this work we're doing on these priorities we have to be ready to address innovation in the system and we cannot assume that the financial system is just going to stand still while we set about thinking how we'll implement the Capital Markets Union. I think examples of this innovation are fintech and blockchain technologies and you know these are innovations that I think have the potential to revolutionise the financial system and they can bring huge gains in terms of allocative efficiency and competition but they can also bring stability risks of their own if they're inadequately regulated. In that case they represent a sort of rather standard challenge around managing innovative technologies the question of how do you sort of manage the benefit risk trade-off without stifling progress so it's about timing how you do it how quickly you intervene and I think all these issues around crowdfunding all the same issues are emerging. How do you manage this kind of what is a very important innovation but carry certain risks as it grows. Somebody once pointed out to me that cooperative banks wear the crowdfunding 200 years ago so things can get very big. I think I will just move on here. As I said the action plan defines a range of actions that will put the building blocks of CMU in place by 2019 but we don't think the project stops there we're not going to build a capital market in three four years. This is a reform program we think which is about promoting structural change in our financial system and about promoting cultural change and these will not be achieved overnight. They will require a concerted effort to build a system that provides diversified sources of funding and wider opportunities for investment and we believe the success of CMU will depend on the support and the continued commitment of all stakeholders. This includes the European Parliament, the Council, national authorities, the academic community, institutes like this and not least the private financial sector. So it's not for the commission alone. Let me finish now with my third point and my final topic which is a topic which was initially quite controversial but now has become rather accepted around the world and that is the need to ensure an appropriate balance between growth and stability in implementing EU financial regulation. In this context I would recall that along with the capital markets action plan we launched a call for evidence on the 30th of September 2015. The objective of the call for evidence is to understand better the cumulative effects and interactions of the very substantial block of EU regulation which has been adopted in response to the crisis. Now I think it's undeniable that the EU financial sector is now stronger as a result of the new regulatory framework and the actions that has been taken both at European level but also at national level but it's also no secret that this commission and this commission's president has made jobs and growth a key priority of his term. Now by making jobs and growth a priority in no way weakens the commission's commitment to maintaining and safeguarding financial stability but as my commissioner puts it we must avoid the stability of the graveyard. We need stability which accommodates the necessary balance between risk and reward that is needed to support economic recovery and restore robust job creation. So for me it makes sense to take a step back and ask ourselves whether we've managed to get everything right exactly right in financial regulation. It's also important to reflect on whether there are unintended barriers to new market players or innovative business but I want to be really very clear here the call for evidence does not herald a large scale rewriting of micro potential rule books that have been pretty painstakingly put in place over the last four or five years. What it implies is looking again at those areas where recalibration or tweaking of micro potential rules may be required to address any unintended or unjustified impediments to economic growth. Back in 2009 when we were still struggling with the crisis I attended a conference I was allowed to go out once or twice and I went to Sweden where Raghuram Rajan was speaking. He was then I think enroute from being IMF chief economist becoming central bank governor and he highlighted there in this conference what he saw as a regulatory cycle that is often dangerously aligned with an economic cycle. He noted that after every severe crisis there's a tendency to regulate against excessive risk when nobody's really taking any risk at all anymore. This then leads to a problem of growth which in terms of triggers a process of deregulation which in itself then goes too far and then we set off a nice boom bust cycle all over again. So when we talk about you know recalibrating we definitely must not fall into this trap but this does not mean that we should be afraid to review what has been done in financial regulations over the past few years. The question is not whether the regulation was right or wrong. The question is whether the key assumptions that were made about the future financial sector behavior and economic growth in 2008 and 2009 have actually materialized. Did we envisage that eight years after the crisis began that the EU economy would still not have a strong and sustained economic recovery? Did we envisage that so long after the liquidity in the EU interbank market completely dried up that cross-border bank lending would still be a problem and home buyers would still be so pronounced? When we took steps to de-risk the banking book of banks did we really expect that they would simply withdraw from the business or not just reprice it? If we had known these outcomes would we have made exactly the same decisions in every aspect of the regulation? Maybe we would. We might have but I think we should at least check. So I'll now briefly explain to you what sort of feedback we're looking for from the call for evidence. It will run until the 31st of January of this month so you still have another few days left if you're feeling inclined. We have a lot coming in already so I'm not absolutely asking but if you really feel like it please do. We're looking for empirical evidence and concrete examples from all stakeholders in four thematic areas and I say we want empirical evidence and concrete. We do not want people telling us they don't like the leverage ratio. We know people don't like the leverage ratio but they have to tell us how it could be done better with empirical or at least concrete evidence to that effect. We want this evidence in four areas rules that may be affecting the ability of the economy to finance itself and grow unnecessary regulatory burdens interactions inconsistencies and gaps gaps as well and rules giving rise to unintended consequences. So these are the four themes we have listed. It's worth mentioning here that the evidence we are looking for not only relates to EU financial regulations so if you want to talk about the impacts of national regulation if you think you've been gold plated inappropriately we will be listing to that as well. Also if you think there are areas where enforcement is not sufficient we're again very interested. Now the results of this consultation will allow us to get a kind of clearer overview of the situation in the EU financial sector and will give us a kind of better understanding of how recent reforms are impacting and interacting. We would have liked to have done this on a model basis I'll just say this. We would like to have a nice big general equilibrium model into which we could plug all this stuff and the answer would come out probably three because most things in Europe come out as three. We tried and it doesn't work. We have tried partial equilibrium that's better but of course it doesn't really capture what we're looking for. So this basically is taking a different approach. It's saying to the market we can't find these cumulative effects using our models if you can find them and if you can prove it then tell us where they are. So essentially we're asking the financial sector to put its money where its mouth is. If there is a problem show us where it is and help us to to solve it. I think this consultation will help us also in the hundred forthcoming reviews we have to do but these are vertical reviews of legislation so we just look at the legislation. We hope that this call for evidence will give us a more holistic overview and will allow us to see how these reviews might interact. It'll also we hope help us to develop the appropriate calibrations for upcoming level two legislation. So we may be able to recalibrate things as we have done around securitisation. If necessary we may also change level one legislation but we will have to see what comes out of the call for evidence. But I want to add a word of caution here because it's very likely the results of this exercise will be somewhat preliminary because some of the rules we put in place are only partially applied and some of them haven't been applied at all yet. So producing concrete evidence of these may be difficult so I think we're not we're not saying that this is a one-off and quite frankly I think in the future this kind of review of existing legislation will be the bread and butter of my DG. We had five years of little legislation, five years of massive legislation and now it's about not so much more legislation but maintaining the block of legislation to make sure that it kind of continues to respond to the real needs of the financial system. As I said interestingly we felt a bit lonely when we went out with a call for evidence but we're no longer alone in our thinking. The call for evidence now fits in with a recent report from the European Parliament, the Bolts Report. We now have a comment from the G20, we have an exercise in the FSB and even the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has decided also to review its own legislation over the last on proposals over the last five years. So these bodies are also assessing the overall coherence, calibration of these reforms and of course the Commission contributes to all of these work streams so we should them we should hopefully be joined up. So I think I've spoken quite a while so I'll conclude by thanking the Institute again for letting me talk to you about the Commission's work program for the next year and after. I think you'll see we have a pretty full agenda although we were supposed to not do so much. I think delivering on this agenda will require an enormous amount of technical work underlying economic and financial analysis but ultimately policy judgments and these policy judgments I think could have profound effects on how the EU financial sector develops and functions in the coming years. And in preparing these policy judgments the Commission will rely on input from all relevant stakeholders in both the public and private sectors and from institutes like this one. I think the Commission cannot and I would say should not undertake such a task alone and that is why we value opportunities like this one to identify the challenges as we see them and explain our thinking in formulating policy responses and I hope my remarks today have been useful in this process. Thank you. Thank you very much.