Nadia Calviño — Europe Must Make Risk Investable
Her vision is of the EIB Group as Europe’s strategic balance sheet: financing projects considered too early, too large or too uncertain for private markets—and giving other investors reasons to follow.
THE PEOPLE SHAPING EUROPE | Nadia Calviño is transforming the European Investment Bank Group from a largely cautious project financier into a more active instrument of European strategy. Under her leadership, the Group is investing more, accepting greater risk and moving deeper into technology, energy and defence.
Europe has no shortage of strategies. It wants to expand renewable energy, strengthen electricity grids, build artificial-intelligence infrastructure, scale deep-tech companies, increase defence capacity and reconstruct Ukraine.
Between those ambitions and their execution lies a difficult financial territory. Many projects require too much capital, take too long to generate returns or involve risks private investors are initially unwilling to accept.
Calviño believes the EIB Group must occupy that territory. Its role is not simply to lend money, but to absorb enough uncertainty for other capital to move.
“You asked us to step up our financing volumes and risk-taking and we delivered.”
Nadia Calviño, President, European Investment Bank Group
From lender to catalyst
The EIB possesses a form of financial power unavailable to most European institutions. Owned by the EU’s 27 member states and supported by a strong capital position, it can borrow on international markets at favourable rates. Its AAA credit rating allows it to pass those financing conditions to companies, public authorities and infrastructure projects.
Traditionally, this model rewarded caution. The EIB financed economically viable projects aligned with European policy while protecting the quality of its balance sheet. Calviño is attempting to stretch that model without breaking it.
In 2025, the EIB Group—which includes the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund—signed a record €100 billion in financing, supporting an estimated €350 billion in total investment. Its annual volume of high-risk activities increased by €10 billion following the adoption of its strategic roadmap, while equity investment also reached record levels.
The shift is institutional as much as numerical. The EIB is becoming a catalytic investor: using loans, guarantees, venture debt and equity to make projects investable before commercial markets are prepared to finance them independently. Public finance is not intended to replace private capital. It is meant to move first.
Financing the point of uncertainty
Calviño’s clearest expression of this approach is TechEU. The programme aims to deploy €70 billion in EIB Group financing between 2025 and 2027 and mobilise approximately €250 billion in total investment. Its target areas include artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors, health technologies, clean technology and digital infrastructure.
Europe’s hardest projects need capital willing to move before certainty arrives.
The EIB and EIF perform different roles within this architecture. The EIB can provide large loans, guarantees and venture debt directly to companies and infrastructure projects. The EIF operates more quietly through banks and investment funds, acting as an anchor investor and providing guarantees, equity and securitisation instruments for smaller businesses, startups and venture-capital ecosystems.
This division of labour makes the Group more than a single public bank. It gives Europe a financing chain capable of moving from funds and early-stage companies to growth capital and industrial infrastructure. It also places Calviño between Michiel Scheffer and Maria Luís Albuquerque.
Scheffer spots the potential breakthrough. Albuquerque attempts to deepen the reservoir of European capital. Calviño must build the bridge across the valley of death where promising companies encounter the cost of factories, commercial expansion and international scale.
Her Europe is built through financial leverage: a limited amount of public risk-bearing capacity is used to attract much larger pools of private capital. But leverage is also where scrutiny must begin.
The additionality test
Private banks and investment funds have strong reasons to join an EIB-backed transaction. The institution’s involvement can reduce uncertainty, improve financing conditions and signal that a project has survived extensive scrutiny. That is precisely how catalytic finance should work. But it also creates the possibility of free-riding.
If the EIB supports projects that commercial investors would have financed anyway, public capacity absorbs risk without creating genuinely additional investment. Private parties may receive safer returns while the most difficult deep-tech, infrastructure and industrial projects remain unfunded.
Public finance creates strategic value only when it enables what markets would otherwise leave undone.
The danger is not only that public investment crowds out private capital. It is that public guarantees protect private returns on relatively safe projects while leaving genuinely strategic uncertainty with no financier.
Calviño’s success therefore cannot be measured solely by the headline amount of investment described as mobilised. The decisive question is counterfactual: what became possible because the EIB was prepared to participate?
This matters because the scale of Europe’s investment challenge exceeds the capacity of any single institution. Mario Draghi estimated that restoring European competitiveness would require an additional €750–800 billion every year. Even the EIB Group’s record €100 billion in financing and estimated €350 billion in supported investment cannot close that gap alone.
Calviño has no realistic alternative to mobilisation. She must use the EIB’s balance sheet to change the behaviour of a much larger financial system.
Europe’s strategic balance sheet
Climate remains the EIB Group’s largest priority, with financing for energy grids, renewable generation, industrial decarbonisation and climate adaptation.
At the same time, security and defence have moved rapidly towards the centre of its activities. The EIB has expanded eligibility to dedicated military infrastructure, cybersecurity, drones, space systems and defence supply chains. Security and defence are expected to account for more than 5% of its EU lending in 2026.
Weapons and ammunition remain excluded. This boundary has become a fragile compromise between the geopolitical pressure to finance European defence and concerns among shareholders and investors about financial risk, institutional purpose and ESG standards. Explicit weapons financing could also change how rating and sustainability analysts assess the institution.
The EIB’s power lies in taking more risk without becoming a risk itself.
The boundary is already shifting. Projects no longer require a predominantly civilian purpose and equipment or infrastructure intended specifically for military use can now qualify provided it is not classified as weapons or ammunition.
Calviño’s task is therefore not only to increase defence financing, but to preserve political consensus among 27 shareholders and retain access to the broad investor base on which the EIB’s funding model depends.
That balance captures her larger vision. Climate, technological leadership, energy autonomy and defence are no longer separate financing categories. They are interconnected layers of European resilience.
The everything bank
The breadth of that vision creates its own vulnerability. The EIB Group has eight formal priorities covering climate, technology, defence, cohesion, agriculture, social infrastructure, capital markets and investment outside the Union. It is also expected to support affordable housing, water systems, Ukraine and Europe’s global partnerships.
When almost everything becomes strategic, selection becomes harder.
Under renewed European fiscal constraints, the EIB increasingly functions as a pressure valve. Investments can be financed through its balance sheet and supported by European guarantees rather than being carried entirely through national budgets.
But this does not make them free or remove political responsibility. Risk is transferred and shared, not eliminated. When governments send more priorities to Luxembourg without providing sufficient guarantees or making choices among them, they ask the EIB to resolve political scarcity through financial engineering.
The bank could then become the institution to which ambitions are transferred when member states are unwilling or unable to finance them directly.
The discipline behind ambition
Calviño’s central contradiction is embedded in the EIB’s balance sheet. Europe wants the bank to act faster, accept greater uncertainty and finance projects private markets avoid. But the EIB’s power depends on being considered exceptionally safe. Its AAA rating keeps borrowing costs low and allows it to provide attractive financing throughout Europe.
Too little risk would leave the institution irrelevant to the continent’s most difficult challenges. Too much poorly selected risk could weaken the credibility that makes intervention possible. Calviño must build a bank capable of carrying more uncertainty without itself becoming financially uncertain.
There is also a democratic question. As the EIB becomes more strategic, its choices become more political. Decisions about which technologies, companies, regions and infrastructures receive support will help determine Europe’s industrial future. Technical assessments cannot entirely conceal the values and priorities embedded within them.
When every priority becomes strategic, investment stops being strategy.
A Spanish economist and lawyer, Calviño worked for twelve years at the European Commission, including as Director-General for the EU budget, before becoming Spain’s economy minister and First Vice-President. She understands how political priorities are constructed and how financial instruments turn them into projects.
Her achievement has been to make the EIB Group larger, faster and more willing to enter contested territory. The test is whether this expanding risk appetite creates genuinely additional European capacity—or merely a broader portfolio of projects carrying the language of strategic importance.
Europe does not need the EIB to finance every passing priority. It needs an institution disciplined enough to take the first and hardest risks, capable of bringing private capital behind it and willing to step aside once functioning markets take hold.
Calviño’s mission is nothing less than to make European ambition bankable.
This article is part of The People Shaping Europe, a series examining the ideas, ambitions and contradictions behind Europe’s institutional leadership.
Credit
Altair Media / OpenAI
Caption
Nadia Calviño, President of the EIB Group, is reshaping Europe’s public bank into a strategic investor capable of absorbing risk and mobilising private capital for the continent’s technological, industrial and security ambitions.
