ECB clears UniCredit to pass 30 percent of Commerzbank with no upper limit

ECB banking supervision authorised UniCredit to raise its holding in Commerzbank above the 30 percent threshold, published on 16 October 2026. The decision lets UniCredit keep the Commerzbank shares it acquired over the summer through an exchange offer and to keep buying with no upper limit. The remaining regulatory procedures and conditions attached to the offer are expected to be completed by the end of 2026, at which point UniCredit is expected to hold roughly 50 percent of the voting rights and to control the bank. The ECB framed the clearance as a positive assessment of the transaction and of UniCredit's fundamentals.

This is the largest cross-border change of control in European banking in years, and acceptance is one of the businesses that travels with it. Corporate and SME banking relationships are the channel through which German banks sell merchant acquiring, terminals and payment accounts, so control of a top-tier German bank decides who gets to put an acquiring offer in front of that book.

UniCredit is already an acquirer in its own right across Italy and central and eastern Europe, which makes the German franchise the missing piece of a contiguous acceptance footprint rather than a financial holding. For a German market whose acquiring is still largely intermediated by domestic bank relationships, the arrival of a pan-European owner changes who the incumbent is.

Whether the remaining conditions clear inside 2026 and the stake reaches the expected 50 percent, how UniCredit treats Commerzbank's payment and merchant services relationships once it has control, whether German political and labour opposition produces conditions that ring-fence parts of the business, and whether the combined group consolidates acquiring onto one platform.

• finews.com