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 crisis. That sounds impressive until you look at the deal count: just 19 transactions. So the deals that are getting done are larger, but the overall pace of consolidation remains glacial.

No cherry-picking on reform

Perhaps the more consequential part of Albuquerque’s remarks was her rejection of industry lobbying to split up a wide-ranging reform package. European banks have been pushing the Commission to separate various elements of a regulatory overhaul aimed at cutting red tape and removing barriers to cross-border business. Albuquerque said no. She framed the reforms as an integrated suite, arguing that addressing Europe’s banking fragmentation requires tackling multiple issues simultaneously rather than cherry-picking the easy parts.

The European Commission is expected to unveil a comprehensive banking competitiveness package in early 2027. The reform agenda also includes completing the Banking Union itself. A common deposit insurance scheme, one of the most politically contentious pieces of the puzzle, is still on Albuquerque’s to-do list.

Why this push is happening now

Albuquerque’s comments build on a July 2026 communication from the European Commission that emphasized the urgency of growth in the banking sector. The document framed the issue in competitive terms: if European banks can’t achieve sufficient scale, they risk becoming permanent second-tier players in global finance.

Albuquerque brings a practitioner’s perspective to the role. She served as Portugal’s finance minister from 2013 to 2015, a period when the country was navigating its way out of a bailout program. She has been advocating for cross-border banking consolidation since at least March 2025, making this a consistent theme of her tenure as commissioner rather than a one-off statement.

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