Capital Markets, EIB Financing and Dual-Use Investment
Financing Europe’s Strategic Technology Scale-Up
Europe’s strategic autonomy increasingly depends on its capacity to convert savings, public balance-sheet instruments, institutional capital and procurement demand into productive industrial investment. Europe has substantial private savings and an expanding set of public financial tools, but the transmission mechanism remains incomplete: capital is still fragmented across national markets, households remain heavily exposed to bank deposits, institutional investors have not yet become large-scale providers of growth equity, and many dual-use companies remain trapped between grant funding, limited venture capital and insufficient procurement-backed bankability. The financing architecture is therefore not a secondary policy issue. It is a strategic capability that determines whether European technologies can be capitalised, industrialised and retained within the European economic and security system.
The report examines this problem through four connected layers. It first analyses the Savings and Investments Union as the European Union’s attempt to redirect private savings towards productive investment, scale-up finance and deeper capital markets. It then assesses the European Investment Bank Group as a strategic financing platform, covering EIB lending, venture debt, security and defence eligibility, EIF-backed funds, Defence Equity Facility 2.0, TechEU and late-stage growth capital. The third section examines dual-use finance, SAFE, EDIP, procurement-backed investment, export-control risk and investment-screening constraints. The final section provides Defence Finance Monitor’s synthesis, identifying whether Europe is building a coherent financing system for strategic technologies or merely accumulating partial instruments that still fail at the critical interfaces between innovation, production, procurement and market exits.