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A Texas man has been charged with manslaughter after his Tesla (TSLA) Model 3, which was operating in Full Self-Driving mode, crashed into a home and killed a 76-year-old woman.
Michael David Butler, 44, told paramedics “the car was on ‘Autopilot,'” when it hit the
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Stock markets across Asia mostly advanced on Friday, taking their cue from a fresh record close for the Dow on Wall Street, as some of the AI-linked shares battered in this week’s sell-off found their feet again while others kept falling.
The volatility was calmer than the heavy selling seen a day earlier, when worries about stretched technology valuations sent semiconductor shares tumbling across the region.
At the time of writing, South Korea’s Kospi led the bounce, climbing over 4% to recoup part of the nearly 8% plunge it suffered on Thursday. Samsung Electronics, the country’s largest company and a major chipmaker, jumped 7%, while smaller memory rival SK Hynix rose 4.9%.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 added 1%, helped by a 6.6% leap in memory maker Kioxia, although chip-equipment supplier Tokyo Electron slipped 2.5%.
Elsewhere, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 1.7% and the Shanghai Composite rose 0.7%, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 advanced 1.3% and Taiwan’s Taiex bucked the trend, easing 0.6%.
As for European markets, both the Euro Stoxx 50 and the broader pan-European Stoxx 600 opened within a 0.3% range.
The UK’s FTSE 100, Germany’s DAX 30, France’s CAC 40 and Italy’s FTSE MI, all traded between 0.1% and 0.3% higher.
Spain’s IBEX 35taly’s FTSE MIB led the pack and rose about 0.4%.
US stocks were mixed on Thursday, but the Dow still managed a fresh peak, rising 1.1% to 52,900.
The broader S&P 500 ended virtually flat despite seven in ten of its members gaining, held back by another retreat in chip stocks, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq fell 0.8%.
Sentiment drew support from data showing US employers added 57,000 jobs last month, well below the 100,000 forecast and a slowdown on May.
A softer labour market could ease inflation pressure and, with oil back below its pre-war levels, may lessen the case for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates repeatedly this year, an outcome investors would welcome.
Crypto-linked shares also firmed as Bitcoin rose about 2%, lifting Robinhood and Coinbase alongside it.
Still, the AI trade remained under strain.
Micron gave up an early gain to fall 5.5%, a day after a 10.6% slump, while Lam Research sank more than 10% and Nvidia, now worth close to $4.7 trillion, edged 1.4% lower.
On oil, Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 1% to around $73 a barrel early Friday, while US crude added 0.5% to about $69, with prices still sitting below where they were before the Iran war began in late February.
Additional sources • AP
Pembina Pipeline (PBA) has signed a preliminary agreement with Canadian federal and provincial governments, alongside Trans Mountain, to participate in a major nation-building energy infrastructure initiative aimed at expanding global market access for Canadian crude oil.
The multi-stakeholder partnership aims
Missed payroll expectations and revised April and May numbers put the Fed in a tough spot for rate cuts.
June’s employment numbers showed almost no change from the previous month, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 4.2% unemployment rate and an estimated 57,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, roughly half the 115,000 economists expected.
At the same time, the agency also revised April’s and May’s total nonfarm payrolls down by 31,000 and 43,000 jobs, respectively.
According to BLS data, the financial activities sector experienced no job growth in June, after losing 22,000 jobs in May and 43,000 from the end of January. Meanwhile, healthcare and social assistance added the most jobs in June, with 46,600. Among the sectors with the largest job losses were leisure and hospitality (-61,000), information (-9,000), and retail trade (-7,500).
“We know it’s taking people longer to find work, but there are also signs of labor supply constraints in certain industries,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, in the company’s National Employment Report for June. “For now, the overall effect is a slowdown in job creation.”
Using its proprietary methodology developed with Stanford Digital Economy Lab, ADP estimated that U.S. private employers added 98,000 jobs in June. Financial activities saw an increase of 14,000 jobs, placing it only behind education and health services (48,000) and trade, transportation, and utilities (15,000) in job creation.
Small businesses remain the largest source of hiring, with companies with 1-19 employees adding 38,000 new jobs. The companies with more than 500 employees added an additional 25,000 new positions. The companies that fell in between those sizes added 44,000 new jobs.
The revised April and May employment numbers and June’s lower-than-expected numbers reveal a softer labor market in the second quarter than previously thought.
The new figures have created a headwind for the Federal Reserve on possible rate cuts, as inflation remains close to its 2% target, according to the authors of a blogpost on the Curzio Research website.
“But a slowing labor market argues for cuts to support growth before conditions deteriorate further,” they wrote. “That is why the revisions matter. Every policy decision is only as good as the data behind it. If the Fed is reacting to numbers that keep getting weaker after the fact, it risks staying tight for too long.”
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Gold futures gained Thursday after a weaker-than-expected June employment report pressured the U.S. dollar and cooled near-term expectations for rate-tightening from the Federal Reserve.
Only 57K non-farm jobs were added in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, well below analyst forecasts
ConocoPhillips (COP) shares snapped six straight sessions of losses, as the stock was up 1.4% at $104.63 on Thursday.
The oil and gas exploration and production company fell 3.5% in the preceding six sessions. COP is down 11% over the past one month.
A steep NAV drop and a federal probe trigger a high-level departure at BlackRock.
The private credit market’s roughest stretch in years has claimed its first senior leader at a major asset manager.
BlackRock’s Phil Tseng is in the process of leaving his post as CEO of the firm’s publicly traded business development company, according to Bloomberg News.
The move comes amid a brutal year for BlackRock TCP Capital Corp. The firm marked down its net asset value twice in 2026 — by 19% in January and another 5% in May. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been reportedly probing the fund and questioning executives as part of the inquiry.
Tseng, an acqui-hire from BlackRock’s 2018 acquisition of Tennenbaum Capital Partners, remains employed for now with no set departure timeline.
Tseng’s exit echoes a pattern that emerged last fall when two auto-related borrowers collapsed and rattled private lenders. Cleveland-based First Brands filed for Chapter 11 in September after off-balance-sheet financing obscured leverage levels beyond what lenders had underwritten. Founder and CEO Patrick James resigned as the bankruptcy unfolded.
That same month, subprime auto lender Tricolor Holdings began liquidating. Federal prosecutors later indicted founder and CEO Daniel Chu and chief operating officer David Goodgame, alleging the pair systematically misled lenders to keep credit lines open. Goodgame pleaded guilty in June to six counts, including bank fraud and conspiracy, and is now cooperating with prosecutors — a deal that could put him on the stand against Chu, who has pleaded not guilty. Chu had also abruptly resigned from Origin Bancorp’s board days before Tricolor’s implosion.
Industry executives have largely characterized the two collapses as isolated fraud cases rather than evidence of systemic rot. Blue Owl co-president Craig Packer told CNBC in October that the failures “weren’t private credit stories” at all.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink struck a similarly confident tone. On an April earnings call, he told analysts that institutional demand for private credit was “accelerating.” Still, headlines around the sector aren’t reflecting what the firm’s own client and portfolio data showed.
Redemptions from business development companies, key lenders in the private credit market, are surging. Investors requested $20.8 billion in redemptions in the first quarter alone. In some cases, those redemptions exceeded the 5% cap set by BlackRock and its rivals: Apollo Global Management, Ares Management, Blackstone, Blue Owl Capital, and KKR.
Not all private credit funds appear troubled. Goldman Sachs’ private credit fund, for example, honored all redemption requests in Q2 because it reported relatively modest private credit fund redemption requests (3.2%). The same goes for Nuveen Churchill and Oaktree with withdrawals of 3.1% to 4.5%, respectively.
But with so many of the sector’s players posting losses, Tseng’s departure suggests the reckoning is reaching up the org chart.
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European car suppliers and manufacturers are divided over Brussels’ “Made in Europe” strategy, an effort to shield the EU market from Chinese competition.
The EU car industry is facing fierce competition from China, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs across the bloc. To address the issue, the EU is preparing the so-called Industrial Accelerator Act, which is designed to favour electric vehicles constructed mostly with European components in public procurement and public support schemes.
However, EU car suppliers and manufacturers disagree over the proposed law, currently under discussion by EU countries and the European Parliament, which sets a 70 percent local content threshold for electric vehicles.
According to the European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA), the Commission’s proposal is a step in the right direction. Based on a study commissioned from management consultancy Roland Berger that Euronews has seen, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery-electric vehicles manufactured in Europe already contain between 80 percent and 90 percent made-in-Europe components.
Consequently, it considers the Commission’s 70 percent threshold to be achievable.
But the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) is pushing for a different methodology, under which regulators would assess finished vehicles instead of the local content in vehicle components.
“A vehicle is far more than the sum of its parts. Its value also lies in the R&D, advanced engineering and highly skilled workforce behind it,” ACEA said in a position paper published on 1 July.
CLEPA responded that under this methodology, a finished vehicle would require only 50 percent EU-made parts and components, with the remaining 20 percent coming from R&D, design and other activities.
This 20 percentage-point dilution of the requirement for EU-made parts “could result in the loss of 350,000 jobs”, CLEPA warned, saying the Commission’s component-level approach would “safeguard the existing manufacturing base”.
“What we are looking at right now is significant competition from best-cost countries, and the dragon in the room is China,” CLEPA Secretary General Benjamin Krieger told Euronews.
“A ‘Made in Europe’ threshold that ignores where the actual parts are built is a label that ignores the European worker,” he said.
Ouster stock falls after pricing $200M public stock offering at $55.22/share
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Most Asian stock markets dropped on Thursday, dragged down by a wave of selling in semiconductor shares, as European bourses made a subdued start and Wall Street looked set to open in the red before the release of key US employment figures.
The pullback centred on the technology sector, where investors retreated from the chip stocks that have powered much of this year’s rally, amid growing unease that the vast sums Big Tech is spending on AI could leave the market awash with supply.
South Korea’s Kospi bore the worst of it, tumbling around 5% as its heavyweight chipmakers slid. Memory specialist SK Hynix lost close to 8% and Samsung Electronics fell more than 6%.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 shed about 1.5%, with chip-equipment maker Tokyo Electron down around 5.6%, while Taiwan’s Taiex slipped 1.1% as TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, gave up 1.8%.
The falls followed a rough session for chip stocks on Wall Street this Wednesday, where Micron Technology dropped more than 10% and Intel sank around 9%.
The moves stand in sharp contrast to a stellar year for Asian tech, with the Kospi and the Nikkei still up roughly 85% and 34% respectively in 2026.
On the other hand, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose about 0.8%, lifted by an 8.7% jump in electric-vehicle maker BYD after it reported a second straight monthly rise in sales, while India’s Sensex added 0.5%.
In Europe, markets opened flat as both the Euro Stoxx 50 and the broader pan-European Stoxx 600 traded within a 1% range at the start of Thursday’s session.
The UK’s FTSE 100, Germany’s DAX 30, France’s CAC 40 and Spain’s IBEX 35, all traded between 0.1% and 0.3% higher.
Italy’s FTSE MIB led the pack and rose about 0.4%.
Crude prices fell again, trading below where they sat before the Iran war began in late February, as hopes grew that supplies through the Strait of Hormuz will steadily recover.
Brent crude, the international standard, eased around 1% to about $70.89 a barrel while WTI, the US benchmark, dropped 3% to roughly $69.
Attention now turns to the US, where stock futures edged lower ahead of the June employment report, brought forward a day because of Friday’s Independence Day.
Economists polled by Dow Jones expect around 115,000 jobs were added last month.
The figure carries extra weight under the new Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, with investors wary that a strong reading could harden the case for keeping interest rates higher for longer.
According to economists at Capital Economics, demand for AI may keep growing but at a slower pace than many expect, a caution that helped sour sentiment towards the sector.
Additional sources • AP
For more than three years, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ or ‘Mag 7’, which includes Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla, carried Wall Street.
Then came June 2026.
Nvidia dropped over 5%, Microsoft fell about 17%, its worst monthly performance since December 2000, Alphabet declined nearly 6%, Amazon lost roughly 12% and Meta dropped around 11%.
As for Apple and Tesla, the companies had directionally different but equally volatile monthly moves.
Apple made a new all-time high closing price of $315.2 on the second day of the month but subsequently declined more than 10% from that peak.
On the other hand, Elon Musk’s company dropped more than 6% in the first week of June but clawed most of that back by the close of the month, ending roughly flat.
Taken together, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ erased about $2.3 trillion (€2tn) in market value in a single month.
What made the selloff remarkable was its breadth. Usually one or two stocks stumble while the others hold up. This time, nearly every member of the group moved lower.
The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS), which holds all seven companies, fell about 13% from its late May record high.
So what happened to Wall Street’s favorite technology stocks? And why are investors backing away?
The MAGS ETF bled more than $700 million (€615mn) over the month, its worst outflow since it launched in 2023, according to TradingView data. For a fund that had become the simplest way to bet on the US tech boom, the reversal was striking.
One name outside the club had it even worse. Oracle, a hyperscaler not included in the ‘Magnificent Seven’, crashed around 35%, its steepest month since September 1990, after alarming investors with a surge in AI spending and debt.
The fall wiped roughly $100 billion (€87.9bn) off the fortune of co-founder and billionaire Larry Ellison. The market punished the biggest AI spenders, and the numbers explain it.
The five largest hyperscalers are set to spend more than $700 billion (€615bn) on AI infrastructure this year. Microsoft alone is heading towards roughly $190 billion (€167bn), according to estimates from the Bank of America.
The bank said that hyperscaler capital spending has jumped from about 70% of operating cash flow in 2025 to nearly 100% in 2026.
The translation is simple: far less capital left over for share buybacks and dividends, and an increasingly larger bill that will need to be justified with future revenue as costs are climbing too.
The ‘Magnificent Seven’ are the biggest buyers of the memory that feeds AI data centres, and those chips have become scarce and expensive.
Micron Technology, one of the main memory chipmakers, reported earnings per share of $24.67 for its latest quarter, up from $1.68 a year earlier, close to a fifteenfold jump.
Prices for DRAM, the memory inside almost every device, rose as much as 98% in the first quarter alone, a surge some in the industry have nicknamed “RAMageddon”.
While the biggest technology stocks struggled, the rest of the market continued to rise.
LPL Financial chief equity strategist Jeff Buchbinder points to that trend. Excluding the ‘Magnificent Seven’, the remaining S&P 500 companies grew earnings by 17.5% in the first quarter, helped in part by semiconductor and memory producers.
Buchbinder expects that figure to exceed 20.5% in the second quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings growth projection for the ‘Magnificent Seven’ will be lower than that.
In other words, the other 493 companies are now growing earnings faster than the market’s biggest stars, and investors have noticed.
By late June, the S&P 493 – which excludes the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – had climbed 13.7% for the year. In contrast, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ basket was down 6.6%, while the broader S&P 500 posted a more modest 7.4% gain.
According to veteran investor Ed Yardeni, investors are beginning to show signs of AI fatigue, questioning whether unprecedented spending on infrastructure will ultimately generate attractive returns as cheaper open source models proliferate and AI token prices continue to decline.
The ‘Magnificent Seven’ still delivered an estimated 29% earnings growth in the first quarter, and they are unlikely to lose their leadership positions anytime soon.
Yet, the debate has shifted.
Investors are no longer asking whether AI will transform the economy. They are asking when hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment will begin producing meaningful returns.
June may have offered the first clear answer.
The AI trade is no longer a one way bet on seven companies. The ‘Magnificent Seven’ created the AI boom, but they are no longer the only way to invest in it.
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Alibaba, U.S. payments unit to pay $600M to settle U.S. probe
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The stocks with the highest short interest are concentrated in micro- and small-cap consumer-facing names, particularly within personal care products and packaged foods and agricultural companies dominating bearish positioning.
Among the most shorted stocks, Ridgetech (RDGT) leads with
The White House submitted a 927-page financial disclosure to the US Office of Government Ethics on Tuesday, offering the fullest picture yet of how US President Donald Trump’s fortune has grown since he returned to office in January 2025.
Barely established when he was sworn in, Trump’s crypto businesses now generate more revenue than large parts of the property empire he spent decades assembling with his family, earning the US president more than $1.2 billion (€1.05bn) last year.
Two ventures account for the bulk of the crypto windfall.
World Liberty Financial, the firm launched in 2024 by Trump’s sons and business partners, brought in more than $500 million (€438mn) from selling new crypto products, among them so-called governance tokens, which grant holders voting rights in certain company decisions but no ownership stake.
A separate business tied to the $TRUMP “meme” coin, a cryptocurrency bearing the US president’s face and name, generated a further $635 million (€557mn) from token sales.
Trump’s crypto activities appear to be a major driver of the near tripling of his personal fortune, which Forbes estimates rose from $2.3 billion (€2bn) to $6.5 billion (€5.7bn) between 2024 and 2026.
For many buyers, the story has been far less lucrative.
The $TRUMP coin, which briefly traded above $74 in the days after its launch, has since collapsed to under $2, while World Liberty’s tokens have shed around 80% of their value since they began trading last September.
Since the disclosure lists only revenue and not profit, the true scale of Trump’s personal gains cannot be known. However, the filing shows that the US president and his family collected fees and royalties up front, while many investors have seen the value of their holdings fall sharply.
Among those investors was Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who poured $75 million (€65.7mn) into the governance tokens and $200 million (€175.3mn) into both $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins.
A US fraud case against him was later paused before being resolved with a $10 million (€8.7mn) settlement. Sun has denied any connection between his spending and the outcome of his legal troubles.
After the release of the filing, the White House also rejected suggestions of any ethical concerns.
“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” Principal Deputy US Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to AFP.
Kelly said US President Donald Trump had “proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world.”
“All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people, and any so-called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade,” Kelly added.
The filing also details an aggressive international expansion, with new hotel, resort and condominium agreements generating millions of dollars in countries that were negotiating with Washington over trade and security at the same time.
A development in the United Arab Emirates earned the Trump business around $10.4 million (€9.1mn) last year, one in Saudi Arabia roughly $9 million (€7.9mn), and projects in Qatar, Romania and Vietnam were $5 million (€4.3mn) apiece.
Closer to home, the US president’s established businesses boomed alongside all the new ventures.
Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, generated around $77 million (€67.5mn), a jump of roughly 50% on the previous year, as heads of state and executives flocked to the property during his new term.
The disclosure also reveals the wide range of ways the Trump brand is now monetised.
The US president earned millions from a sprawling range of branded goods, from sneakers and watches to bumper stickers, with Trump-branded watches alone bringing in $4.7 million (€4.1mn), and more than $200,000 (€175,300) coming from the “God Bless the USA” Bible, a branded edition promoted with country singer Lee Greenwood.
Branded merchandise of this kind, sold by a sitting US president, has no precedent.
A 1978 law requires the president and vice president of the United States to declare their income as well as their assets.
First Lady Melania Trump’s income is also set out in her husband’s financial disclosure, including more than $10 million (€8.7mn) tied to a biographical Amazon documentary and over $500,000 (€438,250) from her memoir.
For comparison, US Vice President JD Vance reported between $1 million (€876,500) and $5 million (€4.4mn) in royalties from his 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy”.
Critics have long argued that such arrangements blur the line between public office and private profit. The White House rejects the charge outright.
When Klarna chose New York over Europe for its stock market listing, it highlighted a challenge Brussels has been trying to solve for years: Europe’s fastest-growing companies often look across the Atlantic for deeper pools of capital.
As the EU seeks to build its own AI champions, strengthen its defence industry and keep more high-growth companies raising money at home, one question remains: why does a bloc with €37tn in household savings still struggle to finance its own fastest-growing businesses?
Now the European Union has stepped up efforts to reform its capital markets, aiming to make capital flow more freely across the bloc.
Policymakers are pursuing incremental reforms, including greater supervisory alignment, but a fully unified capital market is likely to take many years, as member states struggle to agree on key technical details, slowing the process.
The current speed of negotiations does not reflect the urgency being expressed by the EU’s political leadership: Europe needs more integrated capital markets to compete globally with major powers such as the US and China.
To do so, billions need to be invested in strategic sectors such as AI and defence, amid intense geopolitical uncertainty, including wars and trade tensions.
Lacking strategic industrial and technological leadership means sacrificing geopolitical power and economic resilience, especially in a global landscape where dominance, or even survival, depends on control over resources and expertise.
This narrative has been championed by leading EU politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose goal of making Europe more competitive on the global stage has become the North Star of her political mandate.
For this reason, von der Leyen tasked former European Central Bank President and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi with preparing a report on EU competitiveness, which identified capital markets reform as one of its central recommendations.
Presented in autumn 2024, the report says Europe needs €750bn-€800bn in investment each year, equivalent to up to 5% of GDP, to fulfil its competitiveness goals and remain globally competitive.
“It’s ‘Do this,’ or it’s a slow agony,” Draghi warned in one of his best-known remarks. Draghi describes this “agony” as a prolonged and cumulative erosion of Europe’s economic position, driven by structural weaknesses such as high energy costs and a fragmented single market, which together make the continent less conducive to investment and innovation.
The EU is focusing on two priorities to unlock the potential of its capital markets.
The first is convincing households to invest, mobilising a small percentage of the estimated €37tn in savings. The second is integrating national financial markets across the EU to reduce barriers within the single market, making it easier for businesses to raise funding and for investors to put their money to work.
For this to happen, households need better access to capital markets, along with a better understanding of how to invest and the potential benefits involved. For example, greater participation in financial markets can help individuals build their retirement savings.
At the same time, Brussels must advance the legislative framework — known as the Savings and Investments Union (SIU) — to enable these reforms to take place.
Capital markets are marketplaces where individuals, institutions and governments buy and sell long-term financial instruments, such as equities or debt.
They offer businesses a way to raise funds and support their growth. However, scaling up in Europe remains challenging. Cross-border operations can be costly, time-consuming and involve significant administrative burdens. This is because rules differ between member states, and even where they are the same, their implementation may differ.
These are among the reasons why firms in Europe obtain most of their financing through bank credit.
“What we need to develop is a more diversified funding source,” the head of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), Verena Ross, told Euronews in an exclusive interview with Euronews Business editor Angela Barnes.
Without enough diversification, businesses look for other markets where funding is more readily available, such as the US.
“The US capital market benefits from a more consolidated supervisory approach. There are fewer layers of bureaucracy and red tape because the US uses a single currency,” Rebecca Christie, senior fellow at Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told Euronews.
Christie also said the US benefits from having a long-established federal system and from the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant reserve currency, both of which reduce barriers and increase its attractiveness.
“Anybody who needs financing has an incentive to go to US markets because that’s where the money is,” she said.
A less fragmented European capital market would have far-reaching implications, including making more capital available for strategic investments and strengthening the euro’s international role as a global currency — another major ambition of the current EU leadership amid the dollar’s declining role.
“We live in a global world and, particularly, capital markets are global by their nature. We also need to be attractive to overseas investors, whether they are American, Asian or from wherever they come, and make sure that Europe is a destination for that investment capital,” Ross told Euronews.
Despite broad agreement that capital markets need greater integration, there is still strong disagreement over how to make it happen.
The capital markets union legislation forms part of the Savings and Investments Union (SIU), a package of legislative proposals currently under negotiation.
One of the key pieces of legislation aimed at harmonising capital markets is the Market Integration and Supervision Package, known as MISP.
Despite the intensification of talks on MISP in recent months, member states have yet to reach a common position, particularly on how to harmonise capital markets supervision.
Last spring, the six largest European economies — Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands — made a proposal setting out how to centralise supervisory powers.
In particular, they propose transferring some supervisory powers to ESMA, but there is no consensus on whether to proceed, an EU diplomat told Euronews on condition of anonymity. Even among those who agree, there are differing views on how and over what timeframe this should be implemented.
“The problem with the integration of capital markets is not even a political one; it is more a national issue,” Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, who played an important role in the legislation, told Euronews.
“I think there will be progress in supervision, but there are a lot of details that will be tough to negotiate due to very different perspectives,” Lalucq added, referring to the fact that member states have very different capital market cultures.
Klarna’s decision to look across the Atlantic for deeper capital markets illustrates the challenge Europe faces. While there is broad agreement that the bloc needs to mobilise more private investment, national interests continue to slow progress towards a truly unified capital market.
The S&P Global Japan Manufacturing PMI was revised slightly lower to 54.8 in June 2026 from 54.9 in the preliminary estimate. However, the reading comfortably beat May’s 54.5 and marked the sixth consecutive month of expansion, driven by accelerating output and new orders.
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News What if Revolut Isn’t the Only Threat? How Santander Is Quietly Targeting the US
Europe’s financial innovators are arriving in the US from more than one direction.
After moving to Spain from Los Angeles in January of last year, I quickly realized that much of the innovation in finance is happening in Europe. Meaning the seismic shifts in how consumers manage and spend money in their day-to-day lives.
U.K.-based fintech Revolut filed for a U.S. bank charter with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. recently and expects to establish a banking presence there next year, complete with high-yield savings and checking accounts; access to stablecoins, multi-currency deposits; trading in stocks and crypto; and access to ATM networks (no physical branches).
But as much as JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon seems to—all at once—love, respect, and envy Revolut, I’m not so sure the banking and fintech establishments are quite ready for the neobank’s full-scale entry into the U.S.
As much as I believe Revolut — not to mention bunq — are building the future of finance in the U.S. from Europe, another, less-discussed name could present a significant challenge. Put another way: You can’t talk about neobanks upending personal finance in the U.S. without bringing Banco Santander SA into the conversation.
Fintechs alone may not be the most meaningful competitive challenge to U.S. banks, in other words.
Understanding why starts with one of the first questions Revolut skeptics and banking incumbents around the world love to float: Can a company become a primary financial relationship without being a major loan underwriter?
It’s difficult for a fintech to build a lending business, Felipe Peñacoba Martinez, CEO of Getnet Platforms Payments Hub (a Santander company) and former CIO at Revolut Bank (EU), told Global Finance. “Revolut is aware this takes time,” he said, “and they’re going slower than in other areas.”
Despite serving tens of millions of customers globally and holding roughly $67 billion in customer balances, Revolut’s loan book remains a fraction of that figure. Then again, its consumer lending business is also growing rapidly: up 120% year over year to $2.9 billion, according to the company’s 2025 report.
By banking standards, Revolut’s loan-to-deposit ratio remains small, but its lending segment is no longer theoretical. What matters is whether fintechs can scale banking capabilities faster than banks can scale digital ecosystems.
Peñacoba Martinez points to his own children, all three of whom use Revolut and don’t have a need the company can’t serve. “Big banks are seeing how neobanks are taking market share, especially among younger generations,” he says, and as these users eventually seek mortgages and more complex investment products, Revolut wants to serve those needs.
At day’s end, lending conveniently trotted out as a competitive obstacle is the kind of question keepers of the status quo ask when confronted with disruptive business models. Radio people dismissed streaming. Early Amazon.com Inc. skeptics pointed to the online retailer’s lack of profitability. Blockbuster Video scoffed at a $50 million offer to buy Netflix Inc. History is full of established players evaluating the future through the lens of the present.
The lending question becomes more useful as a lens than a verdict. Is it easier for fintechs to build the lending, deposits, and infrastructure traditionally associated with banks? Or is it easier for banks to build the customer experiences, payment capabilities, and digital ecosystems that make fintechs disruptive?
Santander’s advantage goes beyond its balance sheet. Through Openbank, Getnet, and its broader technology transformation efforts, the bank appears to be assembling many of the same capabilities fintechs spent years developing from scratch and combining them with infrastructure that many challengers still outsource or access through partners.
Traditional banks realize the threat from fintechs like Revolut and need to act, said Peñacoba Martinez, but the challenge lies in execution.
“We all know we need to build a modern tech stack that’s easy to integrate, but how do you do that?” he added. “Building is easy, but decades of history, legacy systems, and mindsets are the hard part. It’s very complex for incumbents due to time. Every year that passes, the situation is worse. The risk of breaking something is a greater challenge for big banks than for fintechs.”
Inside Santander, the approach has been to prove new systems internally before scaling them more broadly. As Peñacoba Martinez described it, the challenge isn’t simply building something new; it’s continuing to improve it after launch. Payments became the first testing ground at Santander, with roughly 70% of group payments now running through Getnet.
The same logic applies to Openbank. Santander Executive Chair Ana Botín has made clear that she wants the platform to reach tens of millions of accounts in the coming years as “a digital bank with branches,” including in the U.S.
When I asked Peñacoba Martinez if these efforts effectively place Santander in direct competition with Revolut, his answer was straightforward: yes.
For all the attention paid to Revolut’s 2027 full-scale launch in the U.S., one of the more consequential battles may involve two companies moving toward similar destinations from opposite directions.
One is a fintech building bank capabilities but marketing itself as a lifestyle brand; the other, a global bank adopting the mindset of a fintech while leveraging advantages fintechs have yet to replicate. The lesson for incumbents in the U.S. and around the world: neither of these models exists in isolation.
Revolut, Santander, bunq, Nubank, and others are part of a broader wave of foreign challengers attempting to capture market share in the world’s most lucrative banking market.
Having helped build products inside Revolut and now helping modernize a global banking group, Peñacoba Martinez has seen both journeys firsthand. Listening to him describe them, one conclusion becomes difficult to ignore: time tends to help one side and hurt the other.
Like a young athlete, fintechs have room to grow aggressively from scratch; they don’t think about limits. For older players, every year increases the pressure to keep up without breaking what they have already established.
There’s no question that the competitive threat to U.S. finance from abroad is real. What remains murky is whether U.S. banks truly appreciate how many directions it’s coming from.
Rocco Pendola is a contributing correspondent based in Spain.
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