Policy Focused Debate

📅 24 February 2026

🕔 From 12:50 to 14:30 (registration and welcome coffee at 12:30)

📍 European Parliament

Context

Europe generates a comparable number of innovative startups to the US, yet it is not equally successful in seeing them scale into globally competitive firms capable of driving productivity, technological leadership, and long-term economic growth. This gap has been highlighted repeatedly in recent analyses, including the Draghi Report, the Letta Report and the European Commission’s Competitiveness Compass and the Startup and Scaleup Strategy. Together, these initiatives converge on a central message: closing Europe’s innovation and competitiveness gap requires enabling high-growth companies to scale within the Single Market. The financial sector plays a pivotal role in ensuring that diverse, attractive sources of funding are available to innovative companies.

A key obstacle for start-ups and scale-ups on their growth journey is wider access to growth capital. High-growth, innovative companies generally lack collateral, established credit histories, and predictable cash flows. Consequently, they rely heavily on early equity investment, particularly venture and growth capital, to fund R&D, market entry, and expansion. However, equity financing in the EU remains limited and fragmented. Currently, only 8% of global scale-ups are based in Europe, and institutional investors such as pension and insurance funds make up just 7% of EU venture funding. This shortage of late-stage growth capital forces many EU startups to seek funding from non-EU investors or to be acquired before scaling up. Europe, for example, has only 263 unicorns (startups valued at over EUR 1 billion)—around 13% of the global total.

The Savings and Investments Union (“SIU”), by strengthening Europe’s capital markets, offers an opportunity to increase the supply of early-stage equity capital to these companies, allowing Europe’s innovators to transition from research to market, and from market entry to European and global scale. Deep, well-integrated EU capital markets can provide startups and scaleups with access to the full range of funding instruments: from seed and venture capital to growth equity, corporate partnerships, and eventually, public listings within Europe.

This event will explore how the EU, through the completion of key initiatives, including the Savings and Investment Union, can support the financing of innovative companies in the EU. The panel will take inspiration from thought-provoking questions, policy options and even recent initiatives to ground the discussion.

Confirmed Speakers

• Sirpa Pietikäinen, EPFSF Steering Committee Member and Member of the European Parliament
• Jörg Kukies, former Minister of Finance (Germany)
• Christian Noyer, Honorary Governor of Banque de France

Don't miss this opportunity to be part of the conversation. We look forward to welcoming you!

This event is reserved for EPFSF members and EU institutions staff. For more information and registration, contact us at secretariat@epfsf.org