Complementing Europe's bank-based system with deeper capital markets and more cross-border financial integration promises benefits, but despite long-running debate and policy action, financial system change remains slow.Fintech has the potential to change financial intermediation structures substantially. It could disrupt existing financial intermediation with new business models empowered by intelligent algorithms, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Lower costs and potentially better consumer experiences could be the driving forces.However, empirically, fintech remains at a small scale, especially in the European Union. Even the largest fintech market, in China, is of marginal size compared to overall financial intermediation. In the EU, much of fintech is concentrated in the United Kingdom.We argue that policymakers need to consider four questions urgently: (1) Develop a European or national fintech market? (2) What regulatory framework to pursue? (3) Should supervision of fintech be exercised at the European level? (4) What is the overall vision for the EU's financial system? Getting the answers to these questions right at an early stage of market development would be an opportunity to shape a stable and cost-efficient financial system. In contrast, late action could mean that Europe loses out to foreign competitors and misses an opportunity to improve financial intermediation in Europe.

In this article, we examine whether the EU's unequal encroachment on its northern and southern members' core state powers since the Euro crisis – manifested in highly uneven burdens of economic adjustment and the reversal of intra‐EU migration dynamics – has in turn affected individual European identity. Using individual‐level data from Eurobarometer pooled over time, we investigate the micro‐foundations of EU citizens' continued sense of belonging, be it shared (national or EU) or exclusive (national). Though a steady majority of EU citizens continues to identify at least partially as European, we observe a rather puzzling North–South divergence in identity among the young and a widening skills gap overall. We argue that the Euro crisis triggered dynamics of southern exit (through surging South–North migration), northern voice (based on EU adoption of policies preferred in the North) and shifting national versus European loyalties, which may have consequences for the changing nature of European identity research.

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During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.