The Savings and Investments Union: Pensions, Household Savings and Securitisation

As a Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and part of the SIU Lab at the Florence School of Banking and Finance, I study the EU's latest attempt to build deeper capital markets: the Savings and Investments Union. The SIU starts from a simple diagnosis. Europe is said to have not a money problem but an allocation problem, with around €10 trillion of household savings sitting in bank deposits while the continent faces a large annual investment gap. My current work examines the instruments meant to close this gap, namely supplementary pensions, Savings and Investment Accounts and securitisation. I ask what they reveal about how the EU turns household savings and bank balance sheets into investment, and who carries the risk.

• In my book chapter Shifting Risk, Mobilizing Capital: Supplementary Pensions in the Savings and Investments Union [forthcoming] I analyse the Commission's strategy for supplementary pensions. I argue that tensions arise because the SIU treats pension funds primarily as a source of capital, although their core role is to act as trustees of workers' savings. The first tension is geographical: as pension funds professionalise and diversify globally, more pension capital does not automatically mean more investment in Europe. The second concerns risk: as a capital mobilisation project, the SIU may shift implicit public liabilities onto individual savers without the safeguards that would legitimise this transfer. This is not an argument against funded pensions. It is a call to design the shift without fully individualising risk.
• In my book chapter Europe's Securitisation: A Different Kind of Revival [forthcoming] I return to a question from my earlier work on securitisation: why has a decade of policy effort, from the Capital Markets Union to the SIU and the STS label, failed to revive Europe's securitisation market? I show that the market did grow, but not as policymakers intended. Instead of investor-facing true-sale securitisation, the growth took place in synthetic securitisation, which banks mainly use for capital management. I trace this mismatch to two sources. One is the persistent benchmarking against the US market, which ignores Europe's different institutional foundations. The other is that banks chose the instrument that actually solved their balance-sheet problem.
• I also write shorter pieces on the SIU for the FBF blog:
  • Closing the gap: can auto-enrolment solve Europe's pension adequacy problem? (September 2026) looks at the Commission's push for auto-enrolment in supplementary pensions and what earlier schemes in the UK, Poland, Turkey and Italy teach us.
  • From deposits to investment: the EU plan to mobilise household wealth (September 2026) discusses the Savings and Investment Accounts recommendation and the challenges member states face in implementing it.

I am currently working on a policy brief on auto enrolment for the SIU lab, forthcoming end of 2026.

Fiscal integration and off-balance sheet public policies:

During my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, I have focused on the European fiscal indicators of government debt and deficit. I was fascinated by the way Government Finance Statistics distinguish between redistributive public policies and marketable public investments, which therefore do not need to be included in the politically salient government debt and deficit indicators.

• This interest culminated in my dissertation Out of Balance, Out of Sight? How the Epistemic Community of Government Finance Statisticians Shapes European Debt Calculations. The dissertation focuses on the puzzling bias of European debt and deficit indicators, which only include redistributive public policies, leaving ample room for the proliferation of off-balance sheet liabilities such as policy banks, state-owned enterprises or public-private partnerships. Off-balance sheet policies became a particularly contentious issue in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, when soaring debt levels forced member states to design budget-neutral policies. The empirical part of the thesis shows how, puzzlingly, statistical experts are not equally strict in the statistical classification of different policies: (1) while government interventions in the financial sector are predominantly included in debt calculations; (2) the statistical rules on public investment instruments such as public-private partnerships and national development banks leave considerable room for off-balance-sheet policies; (3) whereas, the rules on Covid-related counter-cyclical measures leave more room for debt-neutral solutions at the EU level than at the Member State level.
• In my paper Off-balance-sheet policies to the rescue: The role of statistical expertise for European public–private partnerships (PPPs) I dived deeper into the history of statistical rules. Off-balance-sheet policies, like public–private partnerships (PPPs), emerged from technical nuances in debt calculations, allowing EU states to balance investment needs with fiscal rules. After the sovereign debt crisis, PPPs remained crucial despite a 2014 challenge, surviving through strategic cooperation between the European Investment Bank and Eurostat. This alliance helped navigate political pressure and bureaucratic constraints, highlighting how technocrats shape Europe’s fiscal and investment policies.
• I am currently finalizing my article “New Capacity Unlocked: The Lasting Impact of Europes’ COVID-19 Policies” on the different impact of European and national policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article argues that EU COVID-19 policies have reshaped Europe’s fiscal capacity, fostering deeper integration. Unlike constrained national budgets, EU-level policies are not weighting on national debt calculations, expanding fiscal space. By enabling the EU to leverage member states’ resources, these low-visibility processes quietly advance fiscal integration and strengthen European governance.

Systemic risk and other challenges in the insurance sector:

Since I wrote my Master thesis on changing discourse of systemic risk in the insurance sector I have a deep interest in understanding the evolution of private insurance and its regulation. Together with my colelagues Fabio Bulfone and Arjen van der Heide I wrote a sectoral analyis of the European isnurance sector which uncovers the heterogentiy and ongoing fiancialization of the sector. I am also currently transforming my Master thesis into an academic paper:

• In our article “The Slumbering Giant: Towards a Political Economy of Financialized Insurance” Arjen, Fabio and I have provided the first sectoral analysis of European private insurance. This paper introduces the concept of financialized insurance through a sectoral analysis of European insurers amid capitalist restructuring. Challenging the industry’s stabilizer narrative, it shows how profit-driven financial market logics have reshaped insurance. Using firm-level data, it traces the uneven rise of financialized insurance alongside traditional models, contributing to the study of financialization and its impact on a key yet overlooked player in capitalist accumulation.
• I am also currently working on my article “Insuring Stability: The Paradoxical Tale of Systemic Risk in the Insurance Sector”, in which I examine the regulatory discourse on whether the insurance sector, traditionally seen as stable, poses systemic financial risks. Following AIG’s role in the 2008 crisis, regulators developed a systemically important insurer regime, but a decade later, the approach was overhauled. While U.S. regulators resisted international oversight, European regulators strategically reshaped the framework, securing global capital requirements for insurance groups. The study highlights how regulatory cultures and business models, rather than national interests or lobbying alone, shaped international insurance regulation, positioning Europe as a key global financial regulator.

Financial Regulation and the Shadow Banking Sector:

As a research assistant to Professor Matthias Thiemann, I became fascinated by the development of the financial system before the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and the attempts by regulators and politicians to regulate the shadow banking sector after the crisis. Together we worked on two related projects analysing how regulators tried to increase financial stability without disrupting market liquidity by breaking up large banks, and how regulators later tried to revive the financial activities at the heart of the shadow banking system – money market funds and securitisation – to ensure stability and growth. We published these projects in the Journal of Economic Policy Reform and Competition & Change:

• In our article Balancing market liquidity: Bank Structural Reform caught between growth and stability we analyse how the discourse on the economic benefit of big banks has considerably shaped the European regulation of big banks. The EU’s Bank Structural Reform (BSR) sought to separate risky trading from deposit-taking but ultimately exempted market-making. Framed as a trade-off between stability and growth, the reform’s unclear impact moved decisions from the technical to political levels, reinforcing market-based banking.
• In our second article When Brussels meets shadow banking – Technical complexity, regulatory agency and the reconstruction of the shadow banking chain we analysed the way the recent project to build a Capital Markets Union affects the regulation of shadow banking. The shadow banking system, central to the financial crisis, relied on unregulated activities like Money Market Mutual Funds and Asset-Backed Commercial Papers. Post-crisis, EU policymakers shifted from restricting these entities to crafting regulations balancing stability and growth. Drawing on expert input, they faced challenges from national divisions and legislative time pressure, with negotiations shaped by differing financial visions and the EU’s institutional and electoral dynamics.