The European Commission's attempts to improve clearing and settlement in Europe have been delayed, despite a commitment to create a single financial market by next year.

A long-awaited Commission statement on freeing up the plumbing of Europe's markets has been postponed repeatedly, following intense lobbying.

The statement will not now emerge before April, and may not even emerge until a new Commission has taken office in November.

Commission officials have identified clearing and settlement as one of the key areas to tackle to follow-up Brussels current Financial Services Action Plan.

But the Brussels body has been caught between those financial groups that favour liberalisation of the market for securities processing and those that make money from the status quo.

"The Commission has wanted to take the time necessary to seek to strike an appropriate balance between the different interests at stake," said a spokesman for Mr Frits Bolkestein, the EU's Single Market Commissioner. "There are different systems in each of the 15 member-states."

Last week, the European Securities Forum (ESF), a banking lobby group, repeated its call for legislative action from the Commission and unveiled its own targets for combating unnecessary barriers.

However, pressure from banks, clearers and exchanges has complicated the already thorny issue of clearing and settlement. Cross-border trades cost 10 times as much to process as domestic ones, but banks making money from this processing have kept the Commission tied up with details.

NP Paribas, one of Europe's biggest agent banks, which specialises in settling cross-border trades, quit the ESF in autumn.

Industry insiders say the Commission is still keen to legislate on this. But its original impetus for change has been blunted by its own research, which has shown that a lot of the additional cross-border cost would only be removed if European countries harmonised tax laws and other rules affecting securities trading.