After the Union’s United Kingdom’s departure, no European capital has established itself as a financial center. Fragmentation of regulations, absence of common strategy, technological gap: the project of a European city remains unanswered.
The City, an always dominant model
London retains a power of attraction that Brexit has not seriously started. While certain regulatory or legal functions have been partially relocated to the Union, the heart of the British financial ecosystem has remained remarkably intact. Fintech startups, market infrastructure, specialized law firms and large investment banks continue to cohabit in a space where information, capital and talent circulate at high frequency.
This agglomeration model, built on proximity between actors and the density of expertise, remains difficult to replicate in a European space marked by geographic dispersion and the absence of a real single market in financial services.
A Europe at several financial speeds
Rather than a unified center, the European Union has reconfigured around a functional distribution Roles:
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- Paris has established itself as a center of gravity for investment banking activities and asset management. It attracts in particular to ESG subjects and insurance.
- Frankfurt There remains the regulatory and prudential nucleus with the ECB and banking supervision.
- Amsterdam has captured electronic trading, especially in shares and ETF.
- Dublin concentrates the legal headquarters of many Fintechs and Giants of Financial Tech.
- Luxembourg remains an essential hub for fund management and structuring.
But this specialization did not produce the network effect of a single place. Each city remains dependent on its clean legal and tax environment. There is no fluid interoperability system or common governance in terms of technological regulation.
Regulatory fragmentation: a systemic constraint
The heart of the problem remains institutional. The fragmentation of the financial services market in Europe results from a double inertia:
- Lack of capital market union (CMU) : Initiated in 2015, this reform remains unfinished. Title markets, settlement systems-copying, capital gains taxation or rating rules differ depending on the country.
- Divergent approaches to technological subjects : national regulators (AMF, Bafin, AFM, etc.) retain wide autonomy. There is no European equivalent to British regulatory sandbox. Mica, the first common frame on cryptocurrency, remains focused on compliance, not on innovation.
This fragmentation slows down the emergence of pan -European startups with high technological intensity. European Fintech unicorns are often forced to adapt their model to each national market, with high regulatory costs and integration.
Digital infrastructure: a strategic blindness
In the field of critical infrastructure, cloud, data, payments, reporting, Europe is struggling to bring out operational and credible alternatives against the American and Chinese giants. The displayed ambitions of technological sovereignty remain largely out of step with industrial realities and the specific needs of the financial sector.
The project Gaia-Xlaunched in 2020 to federate an interoperable and sovereign European cloud ecosystem, illustrates the limits of the community method. In the absence of a common normative base, from strong incentives to pooling, and clear industrial governance, the project did not lead to a concrete alternative to the services of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. Worse, several initially associated players have ended up joining hyperscalers in their Gaia-X labeled offers, blurring the message of sovereignty.
In the field of financial marketsthe fragmentation is just as visible. Euronext,, Deutsche Börse And SIX continue parallel strategies, without real technological convergence on critical layers: compensation chambers, post-market transaction tools, infrastructure of Know Your Customer (KYC), and tokenization platforms. Each group deploys its own solutions, often on owner cloud technologies, preventing the emergence of a pan -European technical standard.
While European regulators impose ever more complex requirements in terms of Reporting, traceability of flows, auditability and complianceno coordinated effort made it possible to industrialize on the European scale shared solutions based on modern architectures (permitted blockchain, standardized APIs, confidence cloud).
In parallel, non-European hubs advance quickly. London multiplies initiatives in terms of asset tokenizationd ‘Open Finance and ofinterbank digital identityoften in close partnership with the FCA and private consortia. Singapore, Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong structure hybrid (regulated but open) infrastructure around programmable finance.
Technofinancanior sovereignty still to build
In the absence of a continental financial center, Europe could have bet on a Technological Citywhere digital finance, data sovereignty and intelligent regulation strengthen each other. This project remains in the draft state. Public initiatives are too dispersed, industrial ambitions that are too shy.
Europe, however, has assets, a dense fabric of specialized fintechs (compliance, payment, sustainable finance), a banking market open to digitalization, and high data protection standards. But without mutualisation, these forces add badly.
