Europe’s Universal Banks — Scale Without a Common Strategy
What BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Santander, UniCredit and ING could contribute to a European industrial investment platform
STRATEGIC BRIEFING | Europe’s largest universal banks already possess much of the financial machinery required to support industrial renewal. What they lack is not capacity, but a common structure through which their balance sheets, sector knowledge and access to capital markets can become cumulative.
Europe is often described as lacking banks with the scale to finance its industrial future. The comparison is usually made with the United States, where a small number of institutions can mobilise enormous amounts of capital around technology, energy, infrastructure and defence. That diagnosis is only partly correct.
Europe may not have a direct equivalent of JPMorgan Chase. But it does have several large universal banks with deep corporate relationships, extensive balance sheets, specialised sector knowledge and access to global capital markets. BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Santander, UniCredit and ING already finance companies across much of the European economy.
The problem is not the absence of financial capacity. It is that this capacity remains distributed across institutions whose strategies are shaped by different national markets, shareholder expectations and commercial priorities.
BNP Paribas operates one of Europe’s most developed corporate and institutional banking platforms. Deutsche Bank remains closely connected to German industry and the international capital markets. Santander links Europe to the Americas. UniCredit connects Italy, Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe. ING combines a broad European wholesale network with specialised knowledge of sectors such as energy, infrastructure, transport and technology.
Each possesses part of the machinery. Europe has never assembled the machine.
Europe already has banks of scale
Europe’s banking fragmentation is real. Banking licences, supervision, deposit markets, insolvency regimes and taxation remain strongly influenced by national boundaries. Retail banking is still predominantly national. Cross-border consolidation has advanced slowly. Even the largest European banks tend to be associated with a home market from which their identity, political relationships and balance-sheet structure have developed. But fragmentation should not be confused with absence.
The five banks considered here already contain most of the financial functions that a European industrial investment strategy would require. Their corporate lending, project finance, transaction banking and capital-market activities connect large corporations and mid-sized industrial companies to investors and public authorities.
BNP Paribas describes its Corporate & Institutional Banking division as a bridge between a broad corporate client base and institutional investors. Deutsche Bank combines a corporate bank rooted in the European economy with financing, advisory, fixed-income and capital-market capabilities. Santander is developing a more integrated international corporate and investment bank. UniCredit delivers centralised financing and advisory capabilities through a network deeply rooted in its individual European markets. ING’s wholesale bank operates across 23 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and provides specialised lending, corporate finance and capital-market solutions.
Individually, these are commercial strengths. Combined, they begin to resemble financial infrastructure.
Europe does not lack banking scale. It lacks a mechanism that converts the scale of its banks into a shared industrial strategy.
That distinction matters. If the problem is merely that European banks are smaller than their largest American counterparts, the apparent solution is consolidation: fewer banks, larger balance sheets and more centralised decision-making.
But if the problem is that existing capabilities cannot be combined around common European objectives, then the solution is different. Europe does not first need to create a new megabank. It needs an architecture through which existing institutions can finance together without becoming one institution.
The policy diagnosis is already widely shared. Mario Draghi estimated that Europe will require an additional €750–800 billion in annual investment, while the Savings and Investments Union is intended to direct more European savings towards productive assets. Yet neither an investment target nor deeper capital markets determines how industrial projects are originated, combined and brought to investors. That is the layer a banking platform could provide.
Five banks, five positions in the system
The strength of these banks lies partly in the fact that they are not identical.
BNP Paribas could provide the institutional and capital-market interface. Its corporate and institutional banking franchise already connects companies requiring finance with investors seeking assets, while its securities services and asset-management capabilities could help package industrial exposures for wider distribution.
Deutsche Bank could contribute its proximity to German industry, internationally active Mittelstand companies and debt markets. Europe’s future investments will be embedded in export chains, specialised suppliers and cross-border production systems. Deutsche Bank understands the financial geography of those systems.
Santander offers a different kind of reach. Its presence across Europe and the Americas could connect European projects to international customers and capital. Industrial sovereignty cannot mean isolation: a European platform must anchor production in Europe while remaining connected to global demand.
UniCredit could provide an industrial corridor through Italy, Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe, where manufacturing, engineering and energy networks intersect. Its model illustrates what a European platform needs: knowledge that remains local, but financial products that can be manufactured at scale.
ING could contribute specialised finance in energy, transport, infrastructure and transition. Its value would not be defined by balance-sheet size alone, but by its capacity to recognise connections between technologies, projects and markets.
This is not a formal division of labour. Nor does it imply that each bank should be confined to a particular geography or capability. It illustrates a larger principle.
Europe does not need its largest banks to become identical. It needs their differences to become interoperable.
Fragmentation is a weakness when institutions duplicate functions, protect national positions and leave capital trapped within separate markets. It can become a strength when different networks, capabilities and risk perspectives are connected through a common architecture.
Financing European companies is not yet a European strategy
Europe’s banks increasingly use the language of competitiveness, innovation, strategic autonomy and transition. They also work with the European Investment Bank (EIB) and European Investment Fund (EIF) on guarantee programmes and specialised financing arrangements.
In 2026, BNP Paribas expanded an InvestEU-backed agreement with the EIF to support innovative and sustainable scale-ups. UniCredit and the EIF agreed on guarantees intended to unlock financing across several Central and Eastern European markets. Deutsche Bank has worked with the EIB on financing for companies in European defence supply chains. Comparable structures have been used across energy, small business, sustainability and innovation.
These arrangements demonstrate that public guarantees can mobilise commercial bank lending. They also show that European institutions and private banks are already capable of sharing risk.
But most programmes remain bounded by a specific guarantee, geography, target group or policy category. They expand the supply of finance without necessarily changing the architecture through which Europe allocates capital.
Each bank still makes decisions through its own balance sheet. Each optimises risk-weighted assets, returns and client relationships within its own commercial strategy. Even when European public resources are involved, financing is frequently distributed through separate programmes rather than assembled into a recognisable European industrial portfolio.
This is the institutional gap.
Financing European companies is not the same as financing Europe as an industrial system.
A bank can finance a battery plant, a data centre or a semiconductor supplier and still have no responsibility for the infrastructure surrounding it. It can assess the creditworthiness of an individual company while remaining unable to influence whether the energy grid, customer demand, workforce, logistics or adjacent suppliers will develop with it.
Banking is organised around identifiable borrowers and transactions. Industrial renewal depends increasingly on systems.
The platform, not the merger
A European response does not require BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Santander, UniCredit and ING to merge. It does not require them to surrender their client relationships or place lending decisions under direct political control. It requires a shared investment layer.
Such a platform could originate and assemble investments in sectors that Europe has already identified as strategically important: semiconductors and photonics, electricity grids and storage, telecom and cloud infrastructure, defence and space systems, critical materials, industrial AI and advanced manufacturing.
The participating banks would continue to originate transactions through their existing corporate networks. Their sector teams would assess technologies, companies, supply chains and markets. Banks could retain part of the credit exposure while placing another part into diversified portfolios organised around a sector, infrastructure layer or industrial objective.
European institutions could assume risks that markets are structurally unwilling to bear alone. The EIB and EIF could provide guarantees, anchor investments or first-loss protection where projects have high public value but face long development periods, uncertain early demand or technology risk.
National promotional institutions such as KfW, Bpifrance and CDP could contribute local market knowledge, co-financing and risk-sharing capacity. Their participation would connect the EIB and EIF to national industrial ecosystems—but only if the platform prevented these institutions from becoming separate national compartments.
Euronext and other European capital-market institutions could provide issuance, listing and distribution channels. At scale, the platform could become a standardised European securitisation mechanism for industrial finance. Banks would originate and assess loans, retain an appropriate share of the risk and place diversified portfolios with pension funds, insurers and other long-term investors. Public guarantees could absorb carefully defined first-loss or policy risks. By transferring part of the exposure, banks would release balance-sheet capacity and finance the next generation of projects.
The objective would not be to remove risk. It would be to divide risk according to institutional capacity.
Banks understand borrowers and projects. Public institutions can absorb carefully defined policy risk. Institutional investors can provide long-duration capital. Capital markets can create liquidity and price discovery. No single institution has to perform every function.
The platform would not replace the banks. It would make their existing capabilities cumulative.
This is the central difference between scale through consolidation and scale through architecture. A merger concentrates assets inside one balance sheet. A platform allows several balance sheets, public guarantees and pools of private capital to operate as one financing system while remaining institutionally separate.
From bankable projects to investable systems
European investment debates frequently return to the shortage of bankable projects. The phrase suggests that capital is available but that too few projects offer an acceptable combination of risk, return and maturity. Sometimes that is true. But it may also reflect the way projects are presented.
A semiconductor facility depends on electricity, water, materials, packaging and skilled labour. A hydrogen plant needs infrastructure and long-term buyers. A defence supplier may need predictable procurement. A European cloud provider becomes more viable when connected to data centres, energy contracts and public demand.
Individually, each investment may appear uncertain. Together, they can form a system with reinforcing demand.
The platform should therefore identify relationships between investments and construct portfolios around them. Instead of asking only whether one battery factory is bankable, it could ask what combination of energy, processing, recycling and customer commitments would make the ecosystem investable.
This changes the unit of analysis. The relevant asset is no longer only the company or project. It is the industrial system of which that company forms a part.
America often finances companies at scale. Europe may need to learn how to finance systems at scale.
This approach may be particularly suited to Europe. The continent’s industrial capabilities are spread across countries, regions and specialised companies. A photonics company in Eindhoven may depend on manufacturing equipment from Germany, materials from France, packaging expertise in Belgium and customers across the European telecom or automotive sector. No national financial system can see the entire structure clearly.
The same fragmentation that makes European coordination difficult also creates the case for a shared platform. The platform would not erase geography. It would make cross-border industrial relationships financially visible.
The governance cannot be an afterthought
Any proposal for a European industrial investment platform immediately raises questions of power. Who decides which sectors are strategic? Who carries the losses when technology fails? How can public guarantees be used without privatising gains and socialising losses? Would the largest banks dominate project selection or exclude regional lenders and new entrants? These questions determine whether the platform deserves to exist.
The platform would therefore have to operate as an open syndication architecture rather than an exclusive club. Common standards for origination, risk classification and portfolio construction should allow smaller commercial banks, regional lenders and promotional institutions to participate. Cooperation should expand access to industrial finance, not divide markets between the largest incumbents. Its governance should therefore distinguish three functions.
European institutions and elected authorities should establish the broad public priorities. They can determine where resilience, security, decarbonisation or technological capability creates value that is not fully reflected in immediate financial returns. They can also define the conditions attached to guarantees and public participation.
Banks should retain responsibility for credit analysis, transaction structuring and commercial discipline. Political objectives cannot make technically weak projects viable. The banks’ knowledge of companies, sectors and execution risk is precisely what prevents industrial strategy from becoming indiscriminate subsidy allocation.
Investors should decide whether the resulting portfolios offer an acceptable relationship between risk, return and duration. A platform that cannot attract private capital after risks have been structured and transparently allocated is not yet functioning as a market architecture.
Independent reporting would be essential. The platform should disclose not only the amount of capital mobilised, but where that capital flows, what risks public institutions assume, which industrial dependencies are reduced and whether supported systems ultimately create sustainable demand.
This layered governance would not eliminate political influence or commercial self-interest. It would make their respective roles more explicit.
A test for Europe’s banks
Europe’s banking debate has long focused on completing the Banking Union, advancing the Savings and Investments Union and encouraging cross-border consolidation. These remain important. More integrated supervision, capital markets and insolvency frameworks would make it easier for finance to move across Europe.
But institutional reform will take time. Industrial competition is not waiting for Europe’s financial architecture to become complete. That leaves Europe’s universal banks with a strategic choice.
They can continue to treat European industrial policy mainly as a source of individual mandates, guarantee programmes and financing opportunities. Each bank may participate successfully. Each may increase lending to selected sectors. Each may describe itself as a partner in Europe’s transition and competitiveness. Or they can recognise that the investment gap is also an architectural opportunity.
A jointly designed platform would allow them to shape standards before those standards are imposed from above. It would deepen their relationships with European institutions, open new assets to institutional investors and give European companies a financing route capable of following them from early industrial deployment to large-scale production and capital-market access.
It would also challenge the assumption that strategic finance must be led either by governments or by American banks. Europe’s universal banks could demonstrate that a plural financial system is capable of collective action without being centrally owned.
The alternative to a bank-led architecture is unlikely to be a fully functioning European market. It is more likely to be a growing reliance on state subsidies, bilateral guarantees and national initiatives that remain too fragmented to reach continental scale.
BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Santander, UniCredit and ING do not need to become one bank. Nor do they need to abandon their national roots or commercial identities.
But if Europe continues to treat their balance sheets, sector expertise and corporate networks as five separate assets, it will continue to possess financial scale without being able to deploy it strategically.
Europe’s universal banks already form much of the financial foundation of an industrial investment platform. The remaining question is whether they will wait for European institutions to design that platform—or begin designing it themselves.
The machinery exists. What is missing is the architecture.
This Strategic Briefing opens Altair Media’s new series Can Europe’s Banks Build an Industrial Investment Platform? The series examines what different segments of Europe’s banking system could contribute to a shared architecture for industrial investment.
Sources and further reading
- BNP Paribas — Corporate & Institutional Banking
- BNP Paribas — Supporting European competitiveness
- Deutsche Bank — What we do
- Deutsche Bank — EIB financing for European defence supply chains
- Santander — Corporate & Investment Banking
- Santander — Europe needs scale and decisiveness
- UniCredit — Client Solutions
- UniCredit and EIF — InvestEU financing across Central and Eastern Europe
- ING — Wholesale Banking in EMEA
- BNP Paribas and EIF — InvestEU support for scale-ups
- European Commission — Savings and Investments Union
- European Commission — EU securitisation framework
- EIB — European promotional institutions and EIB Group cooperation
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Illustration: Altair Media, created with OpenAI
Caption
Five European banks remain distinct while their capital flows converge through a shared investment architecture—connecting commercial lending, public risk-sharing and institutional capital to Europe’s industrial base.
