In Italia, the proportion of wealth held in current accounts is among the lowest in Europe

Is the €1,163 billion held in current accounts by Italians a lot or a little? It is certainly too much when one considers alternative ways of investing that could support the real economy (as well as the return on savings), but from a European perspective, the picture risks being turned on its head. At least when considering the proportion of deposits as a share of total financial assets held by households (excluding, therefore, property investments). In Italia, this proportion stands at 37 per cent, one of the lowest levels across the entire continent. Only Northern Europe shows (significantly) lower levels, with Sweden at 18 per cent, Denmark at 19 per cent, the Netherlands at 27 per cent and Norway at 34 per cent. By contrast, numerous countries in the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe exceed 60 per cent, reaching peaks in Greece (69 per cent) and Bulgaria (70 per cent). These are some of the figures contained in a report published last week by Efama, the association representing the European asset management industry, based on data from Eurostat and the OECD.

According to the Association, by the end of 2025 the average proportion of deposits as a share of total financial assets on the continent stood at 40.1 per cent, down from 42.3 per cent in 2022, the year that marked the peak of the decade following the strong inflows that began in 2020 amid the uncertainty linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. The anomaly of 2020 explains the divergence from the figures of ten years ago, when the share of deposits at European level stood at 36.7 per cent. In 2020 alone, over one thousand billion euros were deposited into current accounts across Europe, a figure that has gradually fallen to 569 billion by 2025.

What sets Italy apart within the European context lies entirely in the composition of household portfolios. In Europe, after deposits, the most popular assets are pension funds (21.2 per cent in 2025), life insurance (15.9 per cent) and investment funds (13.5 per cent). In Italia, the picture is further characterised by government bonds, which, according to a recent analysis by Fabi based on Bank of Italy data, together with corporate bonds, accounted for 8.1 per cent of household portfolios by the end of 2025 (up from 5.2 per cent in 2020). These diversification choices have helped, at least in part, to mitigate the impact of inflation. The EFAMA analysis also takes into account the erosion in value suffered by bank deposits in Europe over the last decade. According to the Association’s data, anyone who had deposited €10,000 in 2014 would have seen their purchasing power fall to €7,605, a reduction of almost 24 per cent.

The study also sets out scenarios for developments over the next 10 years. In one scenario, taking into account the median annual decline in deposits over the period 2016–2025 (amounting to –0.4 per cent) and assuming this trend continues: under these assumptions, deposits will still account for 36 per cent of households’ financial assets in 2036. In a second scenario, analysts looked only at the average decline over the last three years and assumed that deposits would continue to fall at that rate (-0.7%) each year, with the result that households’ wealth held in deposits would fall to 32 per cent. These figures would nevertheless leave Europe far behind the United States, where bank deposits account for just 12 per cent of households’ financial wealth.