Irish stock exchange owner Euronext is open to a merger with its biggest rival Deutsche Börse or a tie-up between the groups’ stock exchange businesses, in a long-discussed combination that could create a European market of “planetary scale”, its chief executive said.

Bringing together Europe’s largest operator of stock exchanges with its German rival could boost liquidity and help make the region’s markets more competitive at a time when EU officials are seeking to reform the bloc’s capital markets, including by centralising oversight of key entities.

Stéphane Boujnah did not rule out the possibility of a full-blown merger between the two companies, but he cautioned that it would have to clear significant regulatory hurdles.

“One deal that would make sense is the merging of the exchanges business,” Boujnah said in an interview, adding that there are currently no conversations between the two groups.

Euronext runs venues in eight countries including Paris, Amsterdam and Milan, as well as post-trade, clearing and energy businesses and has a market capitalisation of €16 billion. Deutsche Börse runs the Frankfurt stock exchange, as well as Eurex, one of the world’s biggest derivatives venues, alongside post-trade businesses, and is valued at about €50 billion.

“The German equity market is shallow, the Euronext equity market is deep,” said Boujnah. “So there will be plenty of synergies in making equity markets closer so that we could have a single equity market addressing the needs of the GDP of the three largest economies of Europe,” he added, mentioning Germany, France and Italy.

The idea of bringing the two exchange groups together has been talked about for decades. Deutsche Börse withdrew a bid for Euronext in 2006 and an attempted merger was blocked by the European Commission on competition grounds in 2012. In 2023, the heads of both companies discussed creating a joint venture for European listings, in an attempt to compete more fiercely with the US.

“On the big bang deal, the antitrust issues are well known … but on paper it is interesting for Europe to consider the creation of a pan-European market infrastructure which has a planetary scale,” Boujnah said.

The EU is currently changing its approach to antitrust, hinting at a greater willingness to allow European companies to strike deals to be able to compete with global rivals. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has also called for a single European stock exchange.

Boujnah said any tie-up would have to make economic sense for shareholders rather than be directed by politicians.

“Any merger discussion that starts top down by some cooking of politicians is doomed to end up like the SCAF,” he cautioned, referring to the French acronym for the abandoned Franco-German jet project.

But the company was open to talks, he said, “the purpose of which is to build something that gets scale. And that creates value for my shareholders.”

Deutsche Börse said: “There are no conversations between us and Euronext on a possible merger,” adding that the company “anchors its businesses across all European financial centres. For more than two decades we have been building the blueprint for a strong European capital market ecosystem.”

Germany and France are negotiating reform of the EU’s markets supervision that would seek to move oversight of the largest financial entities to the Paris-based European Securities and Markets Authority.

Berlin is seeking a carveout for Deutsche Börse. A merger with another stock exchange could mean that Esma would get supervision of the enlarged entity, under a compromise agreed with Italy, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands, as well as France.

This compromise is under negotiation and would need the support of at least nine other EU countries. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026