Europe urged to tap €35 trillion in savings for transformation

Europe’s households sit on about €35 trillion in private savings, and policymakers are increasingly treating that pool as the continent’s best chance to finance a faster industrial and technological overhaul. The central problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of channels that move that money into companies, factories, infrastructure and new technology quickly enough to keep pace with the United States and China.

That warning came through clearly at the inaugural Reuters NEXT Europe summit in London, where the mandate was described as delivery rather than vision. Benoit Peloille, chief investment officer at Natixis Wealth Management, said Europe’s savings base is large enough to fund the energy, industrial and digital transitions if households are given enough confidence and stability to shift money out of very low-risk assets and into productive investment.

The policy backdrop is already in place. The European Commission adopted its Savings and Investments Union strategy on March 19, 2025, with the explicit goal of channeling savings into productive investment and widening citizens’ access to capital markets while improving financing for companies. On September 30, 2025, it followed with a recommendation and blueprint for Savings and Investment Accounts, a bid to make retail investing simpler and more attractive across the bloc.

The urgency behind that push dates back to Mario Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report, which Brussels says was unveiled in September 2024 and later inspired the Competitiveness Compass launched in January 2025. Draghi warned that the European Union risked a “slow agony” unless it coordinated industrial policy better, moved faster and invested far more aggressively. That argument now frames a broader debate over how Europe can compete in artificial intelligence, capital formation and new business creation.

Other speakers at the London event highlighted the gap with the U.S. Nizar Trigui, chief technology officer at GXO, pointed to cheaper energy, more flexible labor laws and faster AI deployment in the American market. The scale of the startup divide is visible in global unicorn data as well: the United States, China and India led the category in 2025, and the worldwide unicorn landscape reached about $5.2 trillion, underscoring how much high-growth value is still concentrated outside Europe.

The savings side of the equation is not in doubt. Eurostat said the euro-area household saving rate held at 15.3% in both the third and fourth quarters of 2024, while the household investment rate stayed near 9.1%. That is the heart of Europe’s dilemma: citizens save heavily, but too much of that wealth remains parked in safer assets instead of feeding the firms and industries that could carry the region through its next economic transformation.