it stand them? Consider the recent fortunes of the three busiest: Andrea Orcel, an Italian investment banker, Xavier Niel, a French telecoms entrepreneur, and Daniel Kretinsky, a Czech corporate raider. Call them the committee to buy Europe. Mr Orcel is the boss of UniCredit, Italy’s most outward-looking bank and its second-largest by assets. He made his name as a hard-charging adviser on big bank tie-ups in the 2000s. Now he is slowly consummating one of his own. In September 2024, when Mr Draghi’s report was released, UniCredit disclosed its initial stake in Commerzbank, a German lender. Since then Mr Orcel has been portrayed as an invader—by the top brass at Commerzbank (“not good form”); by two successive German chancellors (UniCredit is “destroying” trust, Friedrich Merz said in May); and by the German bankers’ union (“the potential for chaos is growing”). Patience and a tolerance for pain, though, come naturally to the committee’s members. For all the drama, UniCredit now controls just under half of the voting rights in Commerzbank. That is not enough to merge the pair. But it is sufficient for Mr Orcel to declare tentative victory over the German financial establishment and turn an eye to the chaos consuming the Italian one. The main issue there is control over Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), the world’s oldest bank, and Generali, an insurer in which MPS, UniCredit and a cast of Italy’s richest industrial families own shares. The Italian state is in the process of selling its stake in MPS, but keeps threatening to expropriate bank profits for good measure. Mr Niel is that rarest of European creatures: an entrepreneur. He made a fortune selling internet access on the cheap, bringing greater competition to the continent’s telecoms industry. Now he is helping to consolidate it. In America there are eight telecoms companies with more than half a million customers. In Europe there are 40. The Americans wring about three times as much revenue out of each customer and lavish far more on new infrastructure (and their shareholders). As well as operations in France and Italy, Mr Niel has big stakes in telcos in Sweden, Ireland and Ukraine, utilising a baroque corporate structure that would make a Brussels committee blush. In May he sold a position in the
Belgian state-owned carrier. This month he acquired one in Vodafone, a British giant whose largest market is Germany. As a pan-European collector of influence in a single sector, Mr Niel is bested only by Bernard Arnault, whose luxury conglomerate, LVMH, is gigantic but has not bought much of late (Mr Niel’s partner is Mr Arnault’s daughter). Last year Iliad, Mr Niel’s main operation, considered a tie-up with Telecom Italia, which has since returned to the warm embrace of the state (by selling itself to Italy’s postal service, naturally). In June his company was part of a consortium which agreed to buy, and then break up, SFR, the second biggest French operator. Committee members must step over the bodies of those who have come before. SFR is owned by Altice, the slowly imploding operation of the French dealmaker Patrick Drahi. Vodafone is so big in Germany because it made the largest hostile takeover in history there in 2000, right before the telecoms bubble burst. Mr Kretinsky is harder to categorise than Mr Orcel or Mr Niel. He is neither hired gun nor entrepreneur, but operates more like a one-man hedge fund. In the 2010s he acquired unfashionable coal and power assets from those without the stomach to operate them. These days he is better known as Europe’s grocer. In 2024 he gained control of Casino, a French retailer, during a complicated debt restructuring. (Mr Niel, to whom Mr Kretinsky sold his stake in Le Monde, a French newspaper, in 2023 also made a bid.) Last year he bought Metro, a German store, and became the biggest shareholder in Sainsbury’s, a British one. Mr Kretinsky’s tastes are extraordinarily eclectic. Until recently he held a 20% stake in Thyssenkrupp Steel, Germany’s largest producer. In November he acquired 4% of TotalEnergies, a French oil major, and he recently became the largest shareholder in West Ham, a football club that has just been relegated from England’s Premier League. That list may well be out of date by the time this column reaches readers of our print edition in Britain, owing to appalling delays at Royal Mail, which Mr Kretinsky also owns. It is remarkable that the dealmaking trio are not better known. Their fortunes matter greatly to the old world. None is a saint acting out of public interest. Yet Europe needs its dealmakers. Mr Orcel’s struggles in Germany are a clear test of whether Europe wants to build a continental rather than a
provincial financial system. Messrs Niel and Kretinsky are central to the future of European telecoms and energy, both of which are vital for its competitiveness. It is equally remarkable that, between them, the trio appear in seemingly every corporate saga on the continent. Perhaps that illustrates how dynamic they are. Or perhaps it reflects how small European business has become. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/07/15/meet-the-committee-to-buy-europe
Storm clouds gather over America’s financial supremacy America’s Hormuz brinkmanship is worsening a global fuel crunch China’s trade gap is narrowing. And other surprises Can Kevin Warsh’s Fed force 5 reimagine monetary policymaking? What investment gurus get wrong How to shrink the Fed’s $7trn balance-sheet
Finance & economics | Wallet Storm clouds gather over America’s financial supremacy Its payments firms may be the first casualties July 16th 2026 LAST MONTH Jamieson Greer, America’s top trade official, complained that Pix, a Brazilian instant-payments system, unfairly disadvantages American firms such as Visa and Mastercard. America proposed an extra 25% tariff on Brazil in response. Yet Brazilians seem unmoved. “Pix is a Brazilian achievement and we will not give it up,” replied Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president and a frequent critic of American power. Even his right-wing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, said he was unwilling to forgo the system, instead suggesting a compromise in which Brazil would promise not to link Pix to cross-border payment infrastructure that rivals America’s.
The episode captures the new geopolitical reality of global finance. As America pursues what Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, recently described as “economic statecraft in the 21st century”, in which global access to the dollar and the American economy is “no longer unconditional”, and other countries try to respond in kind, the global financial system is splintering into regional and national systems. This is happening first in payments. It means a headache for Visa and Mastercard, the industry’s American duopoly. In January Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s economic- and monetary-affairs group, warned that a hostile America could cut off access to payments infrastructure. “You won’t be able to say you weren’t warned,” she said, urging Europe to build its own alternatives. Weeks later a group of British bank bosses reportedly met in London to discuss building a British rival to Visa and Mastercard. “It’s important for all of us [to] have digital payment under our control,” echoed Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), in an interview. Fear of Western-led payments systems used to be confined to places that have “fractious geopolitical relationships” with America, notes John Collison of Stripe, a payments firm. After American and European sanctions cut off Russia’s access to international payments infrastructure, the country shifted to its own messaging system (SFPS) and card network (Mir). China, too, has built cross-border infrastructure, through public initiatives and expansion of private giants like Alipay and WeChat Pay. While much discussion has focused on the dollar’s role, policymakers now see payments infrastructure as a more viable path to independence. Xu Gao, an economist at Bank of China, a lender, argued in May that, rather than focusing on converting cross-border flows to yuan, China should prioritise “[securing] international payment channels” and “expanding the renminbi payment network globally”. In this respect, China and Russia are no longer outliers. Today diversifying from America is “the ardent desire of policymakers in practically every country”, says Eswar Prasad of Cornell University.
One option for those looking to diversify the rails on which cross-border payments travel is to build native systems. Several European projects are speeding up after years of delays. The Single Euro Payments Area, a set of rails for euro-denominated payments, now counts 41 countries as members. A coalition of European banks and fintech firms have backed Wero, a digital-wallet system meant to integrate national fast-payments systems such as iDeal, a Dutch platform. “It’s simple, seamless and Made in Europe,” brags Wero’s site. The ECB also hopes to launch a central-bank issued digital euro by 2029. An alternative is to shunt from American rails onto those of the other superpower. Bank of China has lately added dozens of countries to its digital-yuan system for cross-border exchanges, notes Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council, a think-tank. In March China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, a rival to the Belgian-based, American-dominated SWIFT interbank network, carried a record 920bn yuan ($134bn) in average daily flows, 20% more than the same month last year. In April single-day transaction volume hit a new all-time high of 1.2trn yuan, according to FXC Intelligence, a data provider. A third choice is to eschew international projects in favour of bilateral deals. United Payments Interface (UPI), India’s QR-code-based system, currently works in nine other countries, with several more in the process of joining. Ritesh Shukla of NPCI International, which runs UPI’s efforts abroad, says his team has “a rich road map” for further expansion, both through linking existing systems and helping countries build their own. “Our brand promises that we will make you sovereign, to fulfil your own domestic commitments and to drive your own national agenda,” he notes. In the short run, insufficient liquidity in some currencies may limit the volume of transfers in other corridors, so the vast majority of payments will still touch American rails (or ones to which it has access). Eventually, innovations in digital money may mean many more retail payments can bypass incumbent channels entirely. But in the medium term, as Mr Prasad notes, bilateral and multilateral deals linking national payments systems like Pix and UPI may allow countries to shield significant flows from existing card and correspondent-banking systems.