Italy Already Has a Savings and Investments Union
What Cassa Depositi e Prestiti reveals about Europe’s attempt to turn savings into strategic investment
Europe is trying to solve a problem Italy has been working on since 1850. The European Commission’s Savings and Investments Union is intended to connect Europe’s vast household savings more effectively with companies, infrastructure and strategic technologies. Italy already has an institution built around remarkably similar logic: Cassa Depositi e Prestiti or CDP.
Drawing heavily on Italian postal savings, CDP uses its balance sheet to finance public infrastructure, enterprises, innovation and strategic assets. As of June 2026, it reported €502 billion in total assets, supported by €301 billion in postal funding. Its balance sheet included €130 billion in loans and €39 billion in equity investments and funds.
This does not make CDP a miniature European Savings and Investments Union. CDP is a national promotional institution operating through a publicly anchored balance sheet. The European project seeks deeper capital markets, broader participation by citizens and more investment across borders.
Yet CDP turns Europe’s abstract debate into a concrete institutional test.
🟦 Can savings become strategic capital?
Europe’s investment problem is often presented as a shortage of money. It is not.
European households hold trillions of euros in financial assets. Pension funds, insurers and banks control enormous pools of capital. Yet European companies still struggle to finance growth, while energy systems, defence capacity and industrial infrastructure face substantial funding gaps. The problem is not simply how much capital exists. It is how capital moves.
CDP demonstrates one working mechanism. Italian postal savings products are distributed through Poste Italiane and guaranteed by the Italian state. CDP pools that funding and can deploy it over longer periods than many private investors would normally accept.
A household saver does not personally select an electricity grid, an industrial company or an infrastructure project. CDP stands between the saver and the investment. It provides scale, duration, selection and institutional trust. That can turn otherwise passive savings into productive capacity.
But it also concentrates power. The institution, rather than the individual saver, decides where the capital ultimately goes. Financial allocation therefore becomes connected to industrial policy, regional development and national strategic control.
CDP proves that savings can be mobilised. It does not remove the political question of who determines their destination.
🟦 Can public direction preserve market discipline?
Public financial institutions exist partly because markets do not naturally finance everything societies need.
Infrastructure can take decades to repay. New technologies carry considerable uncertainty. Projects that create substantial public value may offer returns that are too low, too distant or too difficult for conventional investors to assess.
An institution such as CDP can accept longer horizons and absorb risks that private capital might avoid. That is its strength, but also its vulnerability.
Public direction can correct market failures. It can also protect established companies, preserve inefficient structures or allow political priorities to override economic discipline. State guarantees do not make risk disappear; they move part of it onto the public balance sheet. The same tension sits at the centre of the Savings and Investments Union.
Public guarantees, anchor investments and risk-sharing can give private investors the confidence to enter new markets. But if public institutions merely reduce the risk of investments that would have happened anyway, private returns are protected without additional productive capacity being created.
Success should therefore not be measured only by the amount of capital mobilised. The more meaningful test is whether that capital builds companies, technologies and infrastructure that the market could not have financed on the same terms alone.
🟦 3. Does Europe need 27 versions of CDP?
Europe does not lack public financial institutions.
Germany has KfW. France has Caisse des Dépôts and Bpifrance. Spain has Instituto de Crédito Oficial. Italy has CDP. At European level, the European Investment Bank and European Investment Fund provide lending, guarantees, fund investments and risk-sharing instruments.
Europe may already possess many of the financial engines it needs. The problem is that they do not yet form one system.
National promotional institutions are designed primarily to support national economies. Their mandates, accountability and funding structures remain closely connected to their home countries. That makes them powerful instruments of national policy. It can also reinforce European fragmentation.
If Italian savings mainly support Italian priorities, German capital remains organised around German institutions and French investment follows French incentives, Europe may mobilise more capital without creating a genuinely European investment market.
The result would be 27 stronger national capital systems rather than a Savings and Investments Union.
Yet the systems Europe now needs to finance are rarely confined to one country. Electricity grids require cross-border connections. Semiconductor supply chains link research institutes, equipment manufacturers and fabrication plants across several member states. Defence production increasingly depends on shared procurement. Deep-tech companies need access to capital, talent and customers throughout Europe.
A national institution can start that movement. It cannot complete it alone.
🟦 4. Can national capital circulate at European scale?
The central lesson from CDP is not that Europe should construct one continental investment institution controlling household savings. It is that national and European institutions must become better connected.
CDP, KfW, Bpifrance and their counterparts can identify projects, understand domestic markets and build trust with companies and savers. The EIB and EIF can add European scale through guarantees, co-investment and connections between national financing systems. Banks, pension funds, insurers and private fund managers can supply additional capital. But this only becomes a European architecture when capital can move towards productive opportunities across borders.
A project originating in Italy should be able to attract pension capital from the Netherlands or Sweden. A fund supported by the EIF should be able to scale companies across several European markets. National promotional institutions should be able to strengthen European industrial capacity even when not every immediate benefit remains within their own country.
That requires compatible regulation, greater supervisory alignment and political confidence that cross-border investment creates shared value rather than national loss. This is where the Savings and Investments Union becomes difficult.
European countries broadly agree that savings should finance growth. They agree far less easily about which countries, companies and sectors should receive the resulting investment.
CDP shows how savings can acquire strategic direction. Europe must determine how that direction can cross borders.
SIGNAL
Cassa Depositi e Prestiti is not the Italian version of the Savings and Investments Union. It is something more useful: proof that household savings can become long-term strategic capacity when a trusted intermediary provides scale, direction and patience. But CDP also exposes the boundary of Europe’s current architecture.
Europe does not lack savings. It does not lack promotional banks, fund managers or strategic projects. What it lacks is a system that allows these components to operate across national borders with sufficient trust, discipline and scale.
The Savings and Investments Union will not succeed simply because European citizens invest more money. It will succeed when Italian savings can help build shared European capacity — and capital from elsewhere in Europe can strengthen strategic investment in Italy.
Europe does not need one continental CDP. It needs its national capital engines to operate as one European system.
Caption
From postal savings to strategic investment: CDP demonstrates how trusted institutions can give capital direction — and why Europe must now make that capital move across borders.
Credit
Illustration: Altair Media / OpenAI
