The Council of the European Union has formally appointed Carlo Comporti as the next Chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), placing a seasoned regulatory insider at the helm of the bloc’s regulator.
Comporti, who will assume the role on November 1, succeeds Verena Ross following her five-year tenure steering the Paris-based agency.
Who is Comporti?
He transitions to the top job from Italy’s markets regulator, CONSOB, where he has served as a Commissioner since February 2022. Comporti is already a fixture within ESMA’s leadership, currently sitting on both its Board of Supervisors and Management Board.
Notably, his recent mandate as Chair of ESMA’s Digital Finance Standing Committee signals the regulator's continued focus on navigating the intersection of TradFi and decentralized finance.
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In a statement confirming the appointment on Friday, Comporti highlighted the agency's mandate to deepen capital market integration across the continent at a pivotal time for the bloc's economic strategy.
"Now more than ever, ESMA plays a critical role in ensuring that European markets further develop and integrate, to support the needs of companies, investors and citizens," Comporti noted.
Comporti is not a career regulator, having spent over a decade in the private sector as an executive at Promontory, a regulatory compliance firm acquired by IBM Consulting.
Following his stint in the private sector, he served as Secretary General of the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR). In that role, he was instrumental in managing the institutional transition that dissolved CESR and birthed the modern ESMA structure in 2011.
Departing Chair Verena Ross welcomed the handover, citing Comporti's deep institutional knowledge and decades of European market experience.
Looking Ahead: The ESMA Pipeline
Comporti inherits an aggressive agenda at a critical juncture for retail trading.
He will oversee the upgrading of MiCA and the regulator’s efforts to crack down on offshore crypto solicitations. At the same time, it would be interesting to observe ESMA’s evolving position on tokenization, which will drive markets toward round-the-clock trading.
ESMA’s Retail Investment Strategy will also fully unfold under Comporti’s leadership, which would have a definitive impact on retail brokers.
One of the most compelling developments to follow will be how ESMA, guided by Comporti, shapes a targeted regulatory framework for agentic trading.
