Europe finds itself in an investment crunch. The 2024 Draghi Report called for an extra €800 billion annually to boost innovation and growth across critical sectors. Almost two years later, that ambition remains distant. To close the gap, Europe needs to think creatively about the levers it can pull. One such lever, which we explored at length in a recent report, is changing the financial architecture of pension systems. In this article we focus on another, complementary effort: mobilizing a portion of the roughly €12 trillion in liquid assets held by European households in cash and deposits toward capital markets. How can policymakers and business leaders persuade Europeans to move more of their wealth into productive, long-term market investments?

To understand how this might be possible, we convened a digital forum with more than 5,000 residents of Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, providing us with around 13,000 quantitative and qualitative data points. We found that cultural norms that steer people away from capital markets run deep. One survey respondent shared that when their father gave them €100 for their birthday, he said, “You can do anything with it, buy video games or drink it away—but don’t buy stocks.” It’s a perspective that reflects the conventional wisdom about European attitudes toward investing.

Yet our digital forum also reveals that Europeans are open to investing in capital markets when they are given simple, trustworthy information. We put the power of financial knowledge to the test with pensions, where the stakes can feel highest and the politics are most sensitive. The result? A surprisingly high number of participants proved open to reforms that would move significant capital into market-exposed investments. The success of this test in making Europeans more welcoming toward market-exposed pension investment strongly suggests that similar interventions could help mobilize more household wealth to close Europe’s investment gap.