The Savings and Investment Union (SIU): a plan to get Europe's €10 trillion in household savings into real investments!

The EU wants more people to invest, but without proper digital infrastructure, it’s just wishful thinking.

The EU is sitting on a mountain of money, roughly €10 trillion in household savings lie idle, mostly parked in low-yield accounts that barely keep up with inflation. Policymakers know this is a dead end. That’s why the EU just launched something ambitious: the Savings and Investment Union (SIU).

The idea pretty simple, which is to help people grow their wealth instead of watching it slowly wither in savings accounts. But here’s the inconvenient truth: while we encourage more people to invest, the infrastructure underpinning capital markets is still designed for banks and institutions, not for everyday people/investors. And unless that changes, the SIU risks being just another bold plan that fails to scale.

Investing still feels like 1997

Most people don’t avoid investing out of disinterest or lack of enthusiasm., but because the process is outdated and unnecessarily complicated in today’s digital era. Signing up to invest still feels like opening a bank account in the late 90s, due to:

1. Multiple ID checks scattered across platforms

2. Endless PDFs to print, sign, and scan

3. Minimum investment tickets that exclude most households

4. Weeks of waiting for settlement

This system definitely works, but only if you’re a large institution with compliance teams and patient treasury staff. For individuals, it’s a labyrinth of friction, and this friction kills participation, leading to narrow access overall.

Why tokenization changes the game here?

Tokenization sounds complicated at times, but in practice it’s a simple tool to solve long-standing inefficiencies in how markets operate. It’s a backend fix to an old problem, which is, how to make assets truly digital, flexible, and accessible? Here’s what happens when you tokenize:

1. Assets become programmable: Ownership can be updated instantly, compliance checks automated, and transfers handled seamlessly.

2. Access becomes borderless: eradication of country-by-country silos that fragment markets.

3. Costs drop heavily: The machinery of custody, settlement, and distribution gets streamlined.

4. Fractional ownership becomes viable: Investing €10 isn’t a gimmick anymore, but very structurally possible!

5. Mobile enhanched participation: You can invest from your phone in minutes!

Hence, tokenization is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) applied where it matters: the financial plumbing that nobody sees, yet everyone relies on.

Why does the SIU need digital infrastructure to succeed ?

The EU’s Savings and Investment Union is built on an ambition to mobilize household savings for growth and resilience. But people will only invest if it feels intuitive, and in today's era intuitive means digital. The conclusion is very clear: make investing as easy as shopping online! And with a tokenized infrastructure, it is very possible, with reduction of barriers, costs, allowing participation at a scale Europe has never seen before. Without it, we will just keep talking about inclusivity while relying on systems that exclude by design.

From Policy Ambition to Real Participation

Digitization of financial markets should no longer be seen as optional, since now it is the bridge between policy ambition and real, broad-based participation. Only by updating the plumbing can the SIU reach its potential:

1. True financial inclusion, where everyone gets to participate.

2. Rebuilding trust in EU capital markets, making them more and more transparent and accessible.

3. Mobilizing private capital to support Europe’s economic future.

If we get these thing right, the SIU won’t just be another acronym in Brussels. It could be the foundation of a capital market that works for everyone! This opportunity is immense, only if we dare to modernize the system itself.

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