The soon-to-be chair of the European Securities and Market Authority's confirmation hearing by the European Parliament's economic affairs committee could easily have given casual watchers the impression that regulators on both sides of the English Channel are starting to coalesece on policy.
There is, after all, a push from the UK to get closer to the EU, its largest trading partner.
Yet there was Carlo Comporti, the incoming Esma boss, name dropping Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, less than 40 minutes into his grilling.
"In this new geopolitical context, cyber risk is evident. I would echo the words that Andrew Bailey, the chair of the Financial Stability Board, released a few days ago with the letter to the G20 raising the risk of [AI] frontier models," Comporti said.
The mention, however, had more to do with the complexity of regulating AI than with a regulatory rapprochement between the UK and the EU.
Certainly regulators need to help each other out when it comes to such a fiendish, global problem as AI.
"This is new and nobody knows the answers, so there is some value in regulators working together," says Charles Kerrigan, partner at law firm CMS.
"It's impossible to build rules for something when you just have no idea what it will be capable of by this time next week."
Take that away, however, and divergence between EU and UK financial regulation is growing, as the UK remains on a trajectory of cutting some of the burdens imposed on financial firms as part of its quest for growth.
The delay in the UK in applying Basel 3.1 rules until early next year mirrors the US approach, leading to two capital requirement systems co-existing in the same continent for much of this year.
The likely expansion of Esma's oversight capabilities, another topic on which Comporti was questioned, is meant to stop the regulatory fragmentation that plagues the EU's financial sector.
That divergence will cause the UK to lose some of its edge simply due to the sheer size of a more integrated EU regulatory environment. Banks will prioritise the bigger bloc.
Collaborating on an AI's existential threat to the resilience of the financial services sector is a wholly different problem to delaying capital requirement reforms, cutting transaction reporting rules, or watering down short-selling transparency rules.
The debate on whether the UK should align closer to the EU or move away from its regulations is not one that the financial sector alone can settle.
And certainly the UK is in a regulatory bind — deciding between setting its rules more closely to either those of the US or the EU when its financial services clout relies on being able to operate in and between both markets is no easy choice.
While Comporti's name checking of Bailey hints at a move to a more unified front, the reality is that the two jurisdictions are in regulatory competition as well as cooperation. There are also historical and cultural reasons to maintain regulatory distinctiveness. But it is the UK in particular that faces the toughest dilemma in deciding where to strike the balance.