Jean-Christophe Laloux’s appointment may signal a new phase for the European Investment Fund: moving beyond filling individual financing gaps towards creating the structures, incentives and partnerships through which private capital becomes willing to carry European strategic risk.
Strategy Governance
Security and strategic governance shape how states and institutions respond to geopolitical risks, emerging threats and the protection of critical infrastructure.
Europe’s financial architecture does not end with its European institutions. National supervisors and central banks remain essential because integration depends not on eliminating local authority, but on connecting it coherently with the European level.
A serious financial architecture cannot be built on the assumption that institutions never fail. The Single Resolution Board exists to make bank failure manageable — preserving critical functions while ensuring that shareholders, creditors and institutions themselves can still bear the consequences.
EQT has identified more than 1,000 potential targets for the Scaleup Europe Fund. The deeper question is what happens next: whether Europe’s exchanges, institutional investors and regulators are ready when today’s scale-ups become tomorrow’s multibillion-euro public companies.
Europe wants deeper capital markets, but its banking layer remains indispensable. The EBA’s role is to keep that layer coherent across the Single Market — strong enough to absorb shocks, flexible enough to support growth, and connected enough to work with capital markets.
Europe’s public bank is becoming more than a lender. As strategic risks grow, the EIB increasingly helps determine which infrastructure, technologies and industrial capacities can become financeable — turning public financial capacity into part of Europe’s industrial architecture.
