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Christine Lagarde’s departure puts Europe’s unfinished financial architecture in focus. Beyond monetary stability, the challenge is to connect savings, pension capital and public financing with markets capable of supporting European companies through growth, investment and credible exits.
Europe’s capital markets cannot integrate faster than the information systems beneath them. ESMA Data Day 2026 brings reporting, ESAP, market data and supervisory technology together — revealing how financial data is becoming a core layer of Europe’s Savings and Investments Union.
Europe’s investment union may already exist in pieces. National promotional banks, the EIB Group and private investors are building shared financing structures. The institutions are connecting faster than the fragmented markets, rules and savings systems beneath them.
Italy’s CDP shows how household savings can become long-term strategic capital. But its scale also exposes Europe’s deeper challenge: connecting powerful national investment institutions without allowing capital, priorities and productive capacity to remain trapped within national borders.
Maria Luís Albuquerque is trying to connect Europe’s vast household savings with the companies, infrastructure and technologies the continent needs—while navigating fragmented markets, national resistance and the tension between productive investment, financial stability and citizen protection.
Europe is beginning to build the funds its scale-ups need. But growth capital is only a bridge. Without sufficient liquidity, specialist investors and a credible European exit market, its most successful technology companies may still gravitate towards New York.
Europe’s capital markets depend on more than exchanges alone. Who Runs Europe’s Capital Markets? examines the companies operating the trading, data, clearing and market infrastructure through which European capital moves — and asks how those operators shape access, scale, resilience and investment across the continent.
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.
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.
