blackrock vice chairman philipp hildebrand spoke exclusively with francine lacqua about the importancea european banking union. >> being a bank in europe is tough at the moment. scale is one of the answers, but it is not the only answer. you have to have the right, the appropriate business model. but i think all countries should recognize that, for their own respective banks, to operate at scale across the entire european market would be a tremendous advantage. it would also allow shifting the focus away from being too exposed in the u.s. and having more of a scaled up, huge market that you could tap into at the european level. >> this has to be cross-border, right? >> absolutely. >> do you have to do domestic champions first? >> no, i don't think the journey has to go by domestic champions. you have to first have an integrated european market, otherwise it doesn't work. and then you have to have players in the starting position to move into that market. and they will tend to be the biggest domestic players currently. but i don't think we need to think of it as first being a domestic c