Summary

• Ireland’s Taoiseach has said an EU savings and investment union deal could be secured by the end of 2026.
• Dublin will hold the rotating Council presidency from July to December, giving it a central role in brokering compromise.
• The policy is central to Europe’s technology scaleup problem because fragmented capital markets limit later stage funding options.

Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union is becoming a focal point for one of Europe’s longest running economic technology problems: the difficulty of turning savings into growth capital for companies that need to scale across borders.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said an EU capital markets agreement could be reached by the end of 2026, as Dublin prepares to hold the rotating Council presidency from July to December. The push centres on the EU’s savings and investments union, a revived attempt to integrate the bloc’s fragmented capital markets and direct more household and institutional savings into productive investment.

The European Commission describes the savings and investments union as a way to create better financial opportunities for citizens while improving the financial system’s ability to connect savings with productive investment. For technology companies, that is not a background financial services reform. It affects whether Europe can fund the later stages of AI, deep tech, defence technology, climate infrastructure, and enterprise software growth.

Europe has strong research, technical universities, and early stage startup ecosystems, but companies often find the later stage funding environment weaker than in the US. Fragmented national markets, different insolvency regimes, uneven retail investor participation, and limited public market depth all make it harder to build large independent technology companies headquartered in Europe.

The scaleup gap is a market structure problem

The capital markets union project has been discussed for years, often with limited political progress. Rebranding it as the savings and investments union reflects a wider competitiveness debate: Europe needs to mobilise private capital for strategic priorities without relying entirely on public balance sheets.

The technology consequences are practical. An AI infrastructure company needs long term capital before revenues mature. A quantum or semiconductor business may need multiple large rounds before commercial scale. A climate tech manufacturer needs project finance, working capital, and industrial partnerships. A software scaleup that wants to remain European may still need investors able to write larger cheques and support a credible listing route.

Without deeper capital markets, Europe’s most promising companies face a familiar choice: sell early, relocate operational gravity, or raise heavily from non-European investors. None of those outcomes automatically weakens a company, but they can reduce Europe’s ability to capture strategic value from research, procurement, and public policy support.

Ireland’s role is politically interesting because it has a significant financial services sector and has historically been alert to centralisation of supervision. A deal that gives more power to EU level authorities, particularly around major market participants, has often been sensitive for smaller member states. Martin’s more positive tone suggests Dublin sees competitiveness arguments carrying more weight than before, though any agreement still has to manage national concerns over sovereignty, supervision, and market design.

Finance, not just regulation

The EU has spent much of the past decade regulating digital markets, data, AI, platforms, and online harms. Those rules shape market behaviour, but they do not by themselves create large technology companies. Capital formation is the other side of sovereignty.

A functioning savings and investments union would not magically produce European equivalents to every US technology giant. It could, however, make it easier for pension funds, insurers, asset managers, and retail savers to support European growth companies through deeper pools of capital and more consistent cross border rules.

The agenda also intersects with public procurement. Defence tech, health tech, civic technology, cloud infrastructure, and climate systems often depend on government or regulated-sector customers. Companies selling into those markets need investors willing to tolerate slower procurement cycles, certification, compliance, and political risk. Bank lending alone is rarely enough for that kind of growth.

Dublin’s test will be whether it can turn broad agreement into legislative and supervisory compromise. Europe does not lack savings. It lacks a sufficiently integrated mechanism for converting those savings into risk capital at the scale needed by strategic technology sectors. If Ireland can move the savings and investments union beyond familiar slogans, the effects would reach far beyond finance ministries and into the next generation of European technology companies.