Maria Luís Albuquerque — Europe Must Put Its Savings to Work
Her task is to turn Europe’s accumulated private wealth into productive investment—without weakening the security, protection and trust on which that wealth depends.
THE PEOPLE SHAPING EUROPE | Maria Luís Albuquerque is responsible for constructing the financial system behind Europe’s industrial ambitions. Her Savings and Investments Union (SIU) is designed to resolve an enduring paradox: connecting Europe’s vast domestic savings with the enterprises it wants to build before too much capital—and too many promising companies—move elsewhere.
Europe is not short of money. European households hold approximately €10 trillion in bank deposits. Pension funds, insurers and institutional investors manage further pools of long-term capital. Yet European companies regularly struggle to find the financing required to expand across borders, commercialise new technologies or build industrial capacity at scale.
The problem is not the amount of capital Europe possesses. It is the financial architecture through which that capital moves. Maria Luís Albuquerque’s task is to redesign that architecture.
“I want European savers to earn a fair return on their savings.”
Maria Luís Albuquerque, European Commissioner for Financial Services and the Savings and Investments Union
A continent that saves but does not invest
Europe’s financial system remains heavily dependent on banks. Bank deposits offer security and liquidity, but they do not automatically provide the patient equity, venture capital or specialised growth finance needed by innovative companies.
Banks are designed primarily to extend credit against predictable income and collateral. Deep-tech companies, scale-ups and infrastructure projects often require investors willing to accept greater uncertainty over much longer periods. This is where Europe’s financial model begins to work against its strategic ambitions.
Europe is rich in savings, but poor at putting them to work.
The continent generates research, intellectual property and promising enterprises, but too often lacks the financial depth needed to retain them. Capital moves towards larger and more liquid American markets. European companies seek foreign investors, relocate or become acquisition targets precisely when they reach the stage at which their economic and strategic value becomes greatest.
Government borrowing further complicates this circulation. National savings products and sovereign bonds frequently offer familiar, relatively secure and sometimes tax-advantaged alternatives to corporate investment.
Public debt is not inherently unproductive; governments can use it to finance infrastructure, education or technological development. But national sovereign instruments compete with corporate bonds, equity and venture capital for the same conservative pools of savings. The safer and more attractive national products become, the harder cross-border growth capital must work to attract investors.
Europe’s weakness is therefore not simply that it saves too cautiously. It is that its financial incentives remain overwhelmingly national while its industrial ambitions are increasingly European.
From markets to citizens
The change from Capital Markets Union to Savings and Investments Union appears semantic. Politically, it is significant.
Capital Markets Union sounded like a project for banks, exchanges, asset managers and regulators. The Savings and Investments Union begins with households. It asks how citizens can receive better long-term returns while helping finance the companies, infrastructure and technologies on which Europe’s future depends.
That reframing is central to Albuquerque’s approach. The Commission’s SIU strategy combines investment accounts, financial literacy, supplementary pensions, deeper capital markets, stronger banking integration and improved access to finance for smaller and innovative companies. It attempts to make saving, household wealth and European competitiveness parts of the same political project. But changing the language does not remove the risk.
A bank deposit offers certainty up to the limits of deposit protection. An investment can lose value. Citizens cannot be mobilised like an institutional balance sheet and they should not be encouraged to take risks they do not understand.
Savings become strategic power only when they can finance growth at scale.
Albuquerque must therefore persuade Europeans to invest more without suggesting that financial markets can provide security without volatility.
The politics of risk
The promise of broader investment participation sounds inclusive. In practice, it can expose existing inequalities.
Citizens with little disposable income cannot invest money they do not have. Wealthier households are better placed to absorb losses, hold diversified portfolios and wait through market downturns. A policy intended to democratise wealth creation could consequently widen the distance between those able to own appreciating assets and those who remain dependent on wages and public provision. Costs matter as much as access.
Retail investment products are often shaped by commissions, management charges and distribution incentives that are difficult for ordinary savers to compare. Without rigorous protections, a drive towards retail participation risks becoming a mechanism through which financial intermediaries extract fees rather than a genuine engine of household wealth creation.
Albuquerque must therefore combine participation with transparency, competition and what European regulators call value for money. The objective cannot merely be to move deposits into investment products. It must be to ensure that citizens retain a fair share of the returns generated with their capital.
Her political challenge is to make productive investment appear neither reckless nor compulsory.
Building the missing market
Household participation alone will not create the financial scale Europe requires. Albuquerque’s portfolio extends to pension capital, insurance investment, venture finance, banking integration and securitisation—the process through which loans are bundled into tradable securities. Properly structured, securitisation allows banks to transfer part of their existing risk and create room for new lending.
Financial integration cannot endure without public trust.
Europe tightened its securitisation framework after the global financial crisis for good reason. Poorly understood and badly distributed credit risks had helped destabilise the international financial system.
The resulting combination of due-diligence requirements, capital charges and complex regulation also made high-quality European securitisation less attractive to banks and institutional investors. In June 2025, the Commission therefore proposed revisions intended to simplify the framework and adjust its prudential treatment. The political difficulty lies in recalibration.
Albuquerque must release lending capacity and encourage investment without recreating the opacity and misaligned incentives associated with the pre-2008 financial system. She must show that Europe can correct regulatory overreach without abandoning financial stability.
That is a much harder argument than either deregulation or stricter supervision. It requires distinguishing between rules that prevent systemic risk and rules that merely preserve institutional caution.
Integration against national control
The deepest obstacle to the Savings and Investments Union is political fragmentation. Europe has a common currency but not a genuinely unified financial market. Insolvency procedures, tax treatment, securities law, pension systems and supervisory practices still differ among member states.
Financial institutions operating across borders encounter national requirements that increase costs and limit scale. Supervision reveals the constitutional problem most clearly.
National authorities such as BaFin, the AFM and their counterparts possess their own expertise, institutional interests and political accountability. Moving authority to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) would create more consistent enforcement, but it would also transfer power from national capitals to Paris.
The Commission’s December 2025 market integration and supervision package brought that struggle into the open. It seeks greater supervisory convergence and a stronger European role for selected cross-border market actors and infrastructures rather than the immediate creation of a single European equivalent of the American SEC. Even this gradual approach encounters resistance.
Member states support integration in principle, but frequently defend the national institutions, financial centres and tax advantages that fragmentation protects. The familiar European tension between collective scale and national control reappears inside the machinery of finance.
Albuquerque’s success will therefore depend on more than technical design. She must convince governments that surrendering some supervisory discretion will expand the European market from which all of them benefit.
Experience and proximity
Albuquerque brings an unusual combination of political and financial experience to this task.
As Portugal’s finance minister between 2013 and 2015, she operated during the difficult aftermath of the eurozone debt crisis and the country’s international adjustment programme. She encountered directly how financial dependence, sovereign borrowing costs and limited fiscal room can constrain democratic choice.
She later worked in the private financial sector, including senior roles at Morgan Stanley Europe. Supporters can present this as valuable proximity to the markets she now regulates. Critics may see it as evidence of the revolving door between public authority and private finance.
Both interpretations matter. Her years in government may help explain her emphasis on mobilising private capital instead of placing Europe’s entire investment burden on public subsidies or additional sovereign debt. Her private-sector experience gives her an understanding of why investors respond to liquidity, risk, regulation and expected returns rather than political instruction.
Europe’s capital should not have to leave the continent to find opportunity.
But proximity also raises the standard she must meet. A commissioner responsible for retail protection must demonstrate that greater market participation serves citizens and enterprises—not primarily the financial industry distributing the products.
Capital that can choose Europe
Albuquerque occupies the space between Christine Lagarde and Michiel Scheffer. Lagarde explains why monetary stability cannot compensate for fragmented capital and fiscal architecture. Scheffer identifies technologies and companies capable of building Europe’s industrial future.
Albuquerque must create the financial circulation system connecting the two. That makes her role less visible than theirs, but no less consequential.
The Savings and Investments Union will not succeed simply because Europeans possess sufficient wealth. Capital cannot be instructed to move by regulatory decree. It moves towards depth, liquidity, credible opportunities and returns that justify the risks involved.
Albuquerque’s challenge is to build that financial plumbing while preserving public trust: connecting savings to productive activity, allowing companies to grow across borders and ensuring that European citizens become active beneficiaries of economic expansion rather than merely the balance sheet underwriting it.
Europe already has the savings. The question is whether Albuquerque can create a market capable of putting them to work.
This article is part of The People Shaping Europe, an Altair Media series examining the ideas, ambitions and contradictions behind Europe’s institutional leadership—and the different visions of the continent they are attempting to build.
Credit
Altair Media / OpenAI
Caption
Maria Luís Albuquerque, European Commissioner for Financial Services and the Savings and Investments Union, faces the challenge of turning Europe’s accumulated savings into productive investment while preserving financial stability and public trust.
