The centralization of banking supervision at the EU level and the harmonization of banking regulations in the EU has already been a way to foster consolidation in the financial industry. Nevertheless, many obstacles to consolidation – economic (e.g., poor economic conditions in Europe), regulatory (e.g., national discrepancies in corporate law) and cultural (e.g., linguistic barriers) – remain. Zooming on obstacles linked to regulatory and monitoring practices, despite efforts of harmonization, the fact that there remain some national inconsistencies in those practices has been identified as a barrier to consolidation (e.g., some countries assess subsidiaries as separate entities, others as part of a single group). Another issue is the tendency of some EU member states, since the EU sovereign debt crisis, to impose minimum capital requirements to their national banks, hindering the free movement of capital across EU’s subsidiaries. This reaction could be explained by the current incompleteness of the Banking Union: lacking a third – risk-sharing – pillar, national authorities would not be ready to drop their prerogatives. To sum up, despite a willingness from the sector and authorities to boost the competitiveness of the European banking industry, obstacles remain in the way of a further integration of the European banking market.