For France’s famously protective stance, the pronouncement that EU rivals could come and buy French banks was close to sacrilege.
Yet Macron, ever the shrewd operator, is more likely making a devil’s pact to capture some of the post-Brexit financial services jobs flowing out of London, analysts said.
“Macron is saying ‘I am willing to break some French taboos for the sake of this integration because otherwise it will never happen’,” says Mr Véron.
“He wants Paris to become a major international financial centre. And this is an acknowledgement that France cannot have it both ways. He cannot have France as a major international financial centre and keep its traditional protectionism for the banking sector.”
It was not lost on many that Macron’s pro-market banking speech came on the same day that JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley were in Paris for the summit.
Wall Street banks have been keen for France to change its labour laws to make hiring and firing easier.
But could we ever see a BNP and Deutsche Bank merger, or a takeover of Unicredit by Santander?
Europe’s senior bank bosses are split on the merits of a banking merger boom.
In the wake of Macron’s comments, Jérôme Grivet, Crédit Agricole’s top executive, backed the idea, saying Europe needed “bigger and more powerful banks”.
Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS, who recently led the takeover of Crédit Suisse, also expressed similarly pro-merger views, saying Europe “can’t just rely on a crisis” to facilitate consolidation.
Still, the prospect of retail bank mega-deals seems unlikely for now.
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, the low-key chief executive of BNP Paribas, said that Europe’s patchwork quilt of regulations underpinning retail banks made the task of consolidation harder.
Unlike the US, where a bank from California could easily buy a Texan bank with minimal friction, a cross-border European deal would make little financial sense as the costs would be too high, he said.
Another main barrier is the lack of an EU-wide deposit protection scheme, which would provide Europe-wide protection for savers in the same way the Financial Services Compensation Scheme protects Brits.
“It’s still tricky to see cross border M&A happen without it,” says Mr Stimpson.
“But (Macron) is the first leader of a major eurozone country to say ‘I would allow someone to buy one of my large banks’.
“He has to have that reciprocated from enough eurozone leaders for it to be a viable change.”
