Since its establishment in 2011, Verena Ross has held senior leadership roles at the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), serving first as Executive Director before becoming Chair in 2021.
ESMA’s mission is to enhance investor protection, promote orderly financial markets and safeguard financial stability across Europe.
As Ross prepares to step down as Chair in October 2026, Angela Barnes sat down with her for The Big Question to discuss Europe’s investment landscape, the challenges that remain, and the priorities awaiting her successor.
Why do more Americans invest than Europeans?
One of ESMA’s key priorities has been helping to implement the Capital Markets Union (CMU), the long-running initiative to deepen Europe’s financial markets, recently rebranded as the Savings and Investments Union (SIU).
“We still have, as you say, more often 27 national markets than really a single European capital market,” Verena explained.
The SIU aims to further integrate the EU’s fragmented capital markets, reducing European companies’ heavy reliance on bank lending while giving investors genuine cross-border opportunities.
“Capital needs to flow as freely as people can within the European Union,” she added. Citizens, she argued, should feel equally free to make their money work for them wherever they choose to live and invest.
“So there has been a lot of consideration over the last year. How can we make a real step change here? How can we make sure that we use the extensive savings that we have in Europe and convert it into productive investment that supports growth and works for companies and investors?
“Whenever Europe’s capital markets are discussed, comparisons with the US are inevitable. America’s markets are deeper, more liquid and supported by a stronger culture of investing,” Ross added.
So what is holding Europeans back? Why are we less engaged with our capital markets? Is fragmentation alone to blame?
Verena Ross, chair of ESMA joined Angela Barnes on The Big Question – Euronews
“In general, in Europe, people are probably slightly less financially literate, but that is not because they don’t have the intelligence or the wish to learn about it,” Verena Ross told The Big Question.
“It’s more the fact that in America, because you don’t have state guaranteed pay-as-you-go pension schemes, anyone who works and who needs to think about his old age needs to directly be engaged in thinking about investing in capital markets.”
To encourage more Europeans to adopt this mindset, Ross argued that people need access to clearer, more accessible information and better tools for comparing investment options, enabling them to “understand the risks, the costs and the opportunities that come with investing in capital markets.”