Financial markets help allocate capital efficiently across the economy, thereby boosting economic growth- hence the salience of the creation of a single market in financial services within the EU single market project. Nevertheless, despite the EU's financial regulatory programme, it appears that a fully-fledged single European financial market is yet to be achieved. According to some, the substantive context of EU financial regulation is partially to account for this failure. More recently, though, both in policy and academic circles, the focus has been shifting towards the governance of EU financial law. Within this context, this thesis analyses the institutional arrangements for EU financial market regulation and supervision - crystallized in the so-called Lamfalussy framework- and explores the potential and problems of the prospect of institutional consolidation (in the form of one or more EU financial authorities) as an alternative to that framework. The debate, which seemed to have subsided in recent years, is now again coming to the fore, in light of the ongoing international financial crisis. This evidences the close relationship between substance and governance: the quality of rules ultimately depends both on the input that produced them, as well as -if not more- on the quality of the implementation, application and enforcement of the rules. This discussion on the future of EU financial governance is undertaken in two parts. The thesis examines firstly the interaction of 'classical' financial law aims (achieving efficient and stable financial markets) with 'integrationist' aims (the commitment to create a single European financial market, as a response to growing international competition). The thesis then situates the institutional question within the broader context of the EU public law framework in a more deliberate and systematic way than has hitherto been done in the existing scholarly literature. The result is an argument in favour of institutional consolidation in the EU financial sector, with an emphasis on supervision. The case of the US SEC, whose success is arguably based on its enforcement function, is used to illustrate that institutional consolidation is not synonymous with 'one size fits all' solutions, but that flexibility can be incorporated in an authority's regulatory tools. To be sure, further discussion is necessary in order to achieve this balance; but the thesis argues that we do better to focus on the details of the 'how' best to design such institutions, rather than on omphaloskeptical questions of 'whether' they are needed. Indeed, at a closer look, arguments against this approach rarely dispute the need itself for some institutional consolidation, but rather point to the difficulties in its design.