UK’s Post-Brexit Access to EU Financial Markets Still Unclear, EU Official Says

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It is too early to tell if Britain’s financial rules post-Brexit will diverge too far from European Union norms to consider giving it access to the bloc’s markets, a senior EU official said on Tuesday.

Paulina Dejmek Hack, a director in the European Commission’s financial services unit, said Britain has been consulting extensively on changing finance regulations, but with few actual changes so far.

A new UK-EU cooperation forum for financial regulators, due to meet for the first time in the autumn, would discuss rule changes, Dejmek Hack told the European Parliament’s economic affairs committee.

“I think the current UK government has been quite clear that the objective is not deregulation, rather focusing a lot around competitiveness around UK’s… role as a financial center,” Dejmek Hack said.

The UK financial sector was largely cut off from the EU by Brexit and industry officials in Britain hope the new forum can eventually unlock better access.

Brussels has only granted such access, known as “equivalence,” for UK-based derivatives clearing houses, but this is due to end in June 2025. The bloc is approving a law that will force EU banks to shift some euro clearing from London to Frankfurt.

Dejmek Hack sought to play down the forum’s role, saying it would focus on “technical discussions” and not include any joint decision making or joint regulation.

“We would always approach the idea of potential equivalence decisions bearing in mind whether it’s useful for the EU, whether it’s useful for our industry,” Dejmek Hack said, adding the bloc will watch UK rulemaking closely.

“If things were to change, the more it would be difficult to consider equivalence in any event because the rules would be too different to allow it,” she added.

Britain has said it would uphold international standards.

(Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by Christina Fincher)