The European Central Bank may well call for cross-border mergers in the banking industry, but the chairman of one of Europe’s largest banks does not see it happening soon.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, who chairs the board of directors of Societe Generale, says it has a lot to do with the fact that Europe, for now, is not a properly integrated banking market. It is still too fragmented into national entities overseen by national regulators. European governments may have made “enormous progress” on the road to a banking union – notably by creating a joint supervisor for systemic banks – but the political momentum to go further seems to have gone, and Europe lacks both an integrated capital market and a true banking union. “We seem to be rolling on ice,” Bini Smaghi says over lunch in SocGen’s 35th-floor executive dining room west of Paris.