EU finance commissioner Maria Luís Albuquerque backs cross-border banking mergers, says consolidation is overdue

Europe’s top financial services regulator just said what a lot of bankers have been thinking for years: the continent’s lenders should have started merging across borders a long time ago. Maria Luís Albuquerque, the EU Commissioner for Financial Services, declared on September 14 that cross-border banking mergers in the bloc “should have happened a long time ago.” Her reasoning is straightforward. The EU already operates under a Banking Union framework, yet the actual banking sector looks nothing like a unified market. The scale problem Europe can’t ignore Albuquerque’s central argument boils down to one word: scale. European banks are, by global standards, undersized. The largest EU lenders are dwarfed by their American and Chinese counterparts, which benefit from massive domestic markets that don’t fracture along 27 different national regulatory lines. The commissioner expressed surprise that consolidation hasn’t progressed further given the institutional architecture already in place. The Banking Union was designed precisely to make cross-border operations smoother. Cross-border bank M&A in Europe hit €17 billion in value in 2025, the highest total since the 2008 financial c...