Doing nothing with your savings has a price, and new figures put a number on it.
Revolut published its European Wealth Drain Index last week, combining a survey of 20,007 adults across 20 member states with official deposit and inflation data, and the picture it paints is of a continent whose households are quietly getting poorer while sitting on their money.
In 12 of the 20 markets included in the study, average one-year deposit rates fail to keep pace with inflation.
Across the sample, deposits pay an average of 2.76% against inflation of 2.94%, meaning even savers who lock their money away are losing ground in real terms.
Inertia, confusion and app fatigue
The opportunity cost is larger than the inflation loss.
Benchmarked against the MSCI Europe ETF’s ten-year annualised return of 9.06%, Revolut calculates households forgo an average of €638 per €10,000 each year by staying in cash.
Scaled across the €6.3 trillion, that amounts to €422 billion a year in growth capital not reaching European businesses.
Why savers stay put comes down to three things.
Two-thirds have never switched banks for a better rate, with 26% saying they simply prefer their existing bank, 18% considering the difference negligible and 15% not knowing where to look.
Nearly half, 46%, misjudge their inflation-adjusted returns, and 19% are unaware inflation affects their cash at all. Over half use multiple financial apps, and among those, 45% say the fragmentation actively hinders investing.
To make matters worse, one in five Europeans has no savings at all.
If inertia runs that deep, the obvious question is whether better products can overcome it or whether something more forceful is needed, such as the automatic enrolment used to lift pension participation.
Rolandas Juteika, Revolut’s head of wealth and trading, rejects that approach.
However, his company, which has more than 80 million customers, has a clear commercial interest in the answer as it sells the investment products the research says Europeans should be using, and reports that active EU retail investors on its platform grew 56% year on year.
Among those who do not invest, the survey found perceived risk was the main barrier for 29% and a lack of knowledge for 27%.
“Forced enrolment doesn’t tackle the root causes of inertia: perceived risk (29%) and a lack of knowledge (27%),” Juteika told Euronews, adding that “with our median first-time EU investment at just €18, we see firsthand that lowering the barrier to €1 naturally empowers consumers to act.”
Asked whether folding banking, savings and investing into a single app genuinely reduces fragmentation or simply moves it somewhere else, Juteika argued the difference is structural.
Consolidating those functions “removes the administrative wall between a person’s salary, savings and capital markets,” he said.
A continent divided three ways
The regional patterns are stark.
Central and eastern Europe faces the widest gaps between inflation and deposit rates, led by Bulgaria at 2.3% , Slovakia at 1.7% and Lithuania at 1.3%. Yet, appetite for investing small sums is highest there, with 51% in both Bulgaria and Romania willing to start.
Western and southern Europe holds the largest piles of idle cash, with Germany at €1.9 trillion and France at €588 billion, and faces an opportunity gap of 6% to 7%.
Northern Europe has deposit rates that broadly match inflation but the weakest awareness, with fewer than 40% of respondents in Denmark and Sweden understanding how inflation affects long-term wealth.
Brussels wants the same money moved
The findings land in the middle of a live political argument.
Addressing French business leaders in Paris last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made almost identical points, framing idle deposits as a problem of European competitiveness rather than personal finance.
“In Europe, there is no shortage of technology or savings,” von der Leyen declared, adding that “there is still a shortage of capacity to scale up Europe’s businesses.”
Companies that start in Europe too often leave to find funding, she added, shifting their centre of gravity or being bought outright.
“Europe has savings. And unfortunately, those savings are sitting idle,” she continued.
“Today, €10 trillion in household savings are kept in bank accounts. And a large share of Europe’s savings is invested outside our continent. Europe now needs to put these savings to work for its companies. This is the goal of the Savings and Investments Union.”
The Commission’s €10 trillion and Revolut’s €6.3 trillion measure different things.
The Commission figure covers household savings held in bank accounts across the whole EU, while Revolut counts only liquid deposits in the 20 markets it surveyed, which excludes seven member states.
The arithmetic behind Brussels’ interest is straightforward.
The Draghi report put Europe’s additional investment needs at €750 billion to €800 billion a year by 2030 to fund digitalisation, energy, defence and infrastructure, a sum member states cannot raise through borrowing.
Public debt stood at 82.9% of EU GDP in the first quarter of this year and 88.9% across the eurozone, according to Eurostat. If the money is not going to come from governments, it has to come from somewhere else.
The Savings and Investments Union, adopted as a strategy in March 2025 and overseen by Financial Services Commissioner Maria Luís Albuquerque, is the vehicle.
It is not a mechanism for touching anyone’s deposits, and confers no power to do so.
Instead it works through incentives and plumbing with a recommendation on savings and investment accounts giving retail savers a simple route into capital markets, a review of the pan-European pension product on which the Council agreed a position in June, rules on securitisation, changes to how banks and insurers can invest, and deeper supervision.
“Together, these measures could unlock up to €470 billion in additional investment,” von der Leyen said.
Juteika supports the effort but sees a missing piece.
“It’s important that the EU can rely on a unified single market driven by open banking and open finance principles, allowing citizens to see their full financial picture, benefit from innovation, and move capital seamlessly,” he told Euronews, adding that “while policy catches up, we’re already bridging this gap across all 27 member states.”
Not everyone is comfortable. Critics argue that a Commission facing this scale of funding gap has an obvious interest in influencing where household money ends up, and that harmonised supervision concentrates authority in Brussels over decisions previously left to national regulators and individual savers.
The timetable is tight, and von der Leyen has already signalled she will not wait for everyone.
“We now need to reach an agreement, before the end of the year, ideally with all 27 Member States. But if that doesn’t work, if necessary we will do it with those that are ready,” she declared.