Europe’s Real Problem: Institutional Aversion to Risk

Why Europe’s capital is structured to avoid the uncertainty that drives growth

Europe’s Real Problem: Institutional Aversion to Risk

Europe keeps diagnosing the wrong problem.

Much of the debate about the continent’s economic performance revolves around gaps in innovation, ambition, talent or mindset. These explanations are familiar, and they are convenient. But they do not really explain the outcomes people are increasingly frustrated by.

Europe’s issue is simpler, and harder to fix. It is institutional risk-aversion embedded deep in how European capital is structured, governed and incentivised.

This is not a story about a lack of money. Or a lack of ideas. It is about a lack of permission to take productive risk at scale.

Risk aversion is not neutral

Risk aversion often sounds responsible. At the institutional level, it is usually described as prudence. But it is not neutral.

When large pools of long-term capital consistently avoid productive risk, the system does not become safer. It becomes less capable of renewal. Innovation is almost never financed at the moment of certainty. It is financed in the uncomfortable middle when outcomes are unclear, timelines are long and failure is a real possibility.

If institutions are structurally rewarded for avoiding that phase, capital does not disappear. It simply ends up elsewhere, compounding in ways that preserve comfort rather than enable progress. Over decades, that choice adds up.

A deployment problem, not a savings problem

Europe does not lack savings. It lacks deployment mechanisms.

Households save at high rates. Pension systems collect steady contributions. Insurers manage enormous balance sheets. Time horizons are long by design.

And yet very little of this capital reliably supports scale, late-stage growth or the kind of renewal that turns promising companies into enduring ones.

This is not a paradox. It is an allocation problem. Savings exist. Risk tolerance exists too but mostly at the individual level. Inside institutions, it tends to disappear.

Where risk goes to die

If we want to be serious about fixing this, we need to be specific. Two actors sit at the centre of the issue: pension funds and insurers.

They control vast pools of long-term capital and are, in theory, well suited to patient investing. In practice, they are incentivised to behave as though volatility were the main enemy.

Guaranteed products, rigid solvency frameworks, career risk inside investment committees and evaluation cycles that are too short for long-duration assets all point in the same direction. The result is not thoughtful caution. It is systematic avoidance of productive risk.

Zero or near-zero exposure to venture and growth capital is often framed as prudent, or simply neutral. It is neither. It is an active decision to assume that economic renewal will happen without institutional capital.

Founders are responding rationally

When companies struggle to scale in Europe, the story is often personalised. Founders are accused of selling out, leaving, or losing ambition.

That misses the point. Entrepreneurs respond rationally to financing conditions. If risk capital is available early and then disappears as ticket sizes grow, companies adapt. They look for continuity. They follow capital that remains willing to underwrite uncertainty at the next stage.

This is not about loyalty. It is about capital continuity. If Europe wants companies to scale locally, institutions need to stay present as risk increases, not retreat once outcomes start to matter.

The uncomfortable truth

A meaningful share of Europe’s long-term underperformance is not about missing ideas. It is about institutions being structurally more afraid of being wrong than of being irrelevant.

Institutional risk aversion is reinforced by regulatory frameworks that punish illiquidity, governance models that reward consensus over conviction, evaluation horizons that are misaligned with the assets in question, and default allocations that favour guarantees over growth.

None of this is malicious. All of it is consequential. It is possible to optimise for protection for a very long time before realising that the future has been underfunded.

What would actually change outcomes

This is not a call for looser discipline or more hype. It is a call for specific, practical changes.

Pension reform that increases funded components would help build domestic pools of patient capital with a natural equity bias. Clear regulatory permission for long-term risk, particularly for pensions and insurers, would acknowledge that diversified exposure to illiquid growth assets can be entirely compatible with prudence.

Explicit minimum allocations to productive risk, even at modest levels, would compound meaningfully over time. Risk-sharing mechanisms should be designed to crowd in private capital, not replace it. And governance inside institutions needs to evolve so decision-makers are not punished for being early, only for being reckless.

This does not require everyone to move at once. A critical mass would be enough.

A simple test

There is a simple test for any long-term institution.

If you have zero allocation to productive risk, you are not neutral. You are making a choice, the choice that renewal should happen without you.

That may feel safe. Over long horizons, it rarely is.

Why Europe needs to stop avoiding risk

I am optimistic about Europe. I would not be doing this work otherwise. But hope without movement quickly turns into nostalgia.

Europe does not need louder ambition. It needs institutions that are structurally allowed to act on it.

The goal is not to take more risk. It is to stop pretending that avoiding risk is safe. Europe can still move. But doing so means rewiring how capital is allowed and encouraged to behave.