DIRECT VIDEO - Stéphane Boujnah est l'invité de Good Morning Business

The finance bus, it works. That's how you see Euronext's evolution, a European venture that succeeded. When it was recreated in 2014, it was worth 1.4 billion. Now it's worth almost 15 billion. It's worth more than BNP, more than Bouygues, more than Renault, more than Accor, more than Carrefour. So it's really become a very important company in size. But above all, it's a project that worked because Europeans together decided to succeed together rather than fail separately. Decided to create something at scale. I take the analogy with Airbus because what is Airbus? It's countries that decided not to make commercial aircraft alone anymore, to give up being able to do it alone, in order to together build the global competitor to Boeing. Well, today Euronext is a group that is not only worth 15 billion euros but is above all twice the size of the London Stock Exchange when it comes to equity markets. So it's really something we built patiently and methodically. We first worked a lot on the operational margin. It's first a company that became very profitable because we work with a certain expertise, but also because we were able to ensure that different market infrastructures in Europe integrate into a common project where everyone has their place. And today it's a stock exchange that has twice the volume of London. And moreover, it's a group that has diversified a lot since the stock exchange part, the volume business, now represents only about 20% of the company's activity.

Yes, but because for historical reasons, Deutsche Bourse decided to remain independent. And Deutsche Bourse is a company that is much more diversified than Euronext and much bigger than Euronext. Euronext is worth about 15 billion euros. Deutsche Bourse is worth about 45 billion euros.

We will enter the index that represents the 40 companies with the largest free float, meaning market capitalization accessible to the rest of the world, and the highest liquidity. So we will represent about 0.5% of the index, to allow the rest of the world that wants to invest in the largest French companies to do so through us.

I think he's right to say that the things that succeeded in Europe are things where we put ourselves in a difficult position by imposing deadlines. I don't know if it's January 1, 2028. I hope it can be faster than that, but he's right to insist on this. I think Europe has shifted gear on this issue. There's a will from the President of the Commission, an agreement from the main members of the Council to move very fast on a number of things. Things that first fall under the Commission's purview, like trying to advance on a single market supervision, and perhaps also accelerating the transformation of savings across Europe.

The big difference between the United States and Europe is equity markets. At the root of this big difference in equity markets is the fact that in the United States, if you want to have some income when you're old, you need to buy stocks when you're young. You need to save. In Europe, if you want to have some income when you're old, you just need to hope that when the time comes, people will continue to pay taxes and social contributions around you. So the real difference for building equity markets capable of financing the projects that Mr. Draghi has been inviting us to invest in for a year — the real difference is really organizing a transformation of French savings, European savings, towards long-term retirement savings invested in equities. And so it's capitalization. It's the only way because the big difference between the United States, the American economy, and the European economy is not just entrepreneurship, innovation, technology that we talk about a lot. It's that the United States is the world's largest reservoir of long-term savings, because people need it. And so if we manage to generate more retirement savings towards companies' equity, then the European landscape is transformed. So I believe that within the ambitions of the Union for Capital Markets or the Union for Savings and Investment, there is this will to move towards single supervision, towards directing savings towards equity.