Abstract
The aim of this article is to present an overview of cooperative banks in France starting from their emergence, then provide the features of this model, their evolution in recent years, as well as the issues involved. Over the last 22 years, cooperative banks in France have displayed dynamism, especially in the face of listed commercial banks: they have gained market share, launched simple and easily understood products; they have been at the forefront of innovation (online banking services…), and have taken a greater role in recent reorganizations of the banking sector (emergence of cooperative groups), all the while, protecting their jobs and their networks. If cooperative banks have not been spared from the financial crisis, they were not the cause, and have been better able to resist due to the importance of retail banking activity, a diversification into other activities (insurance, electronic surveillance, real estate transactions, etc.) and less of a dependence on networks concerned with financial markets. They have thus maintained a good level of activities, especially in lending, resulting in deposit/lending ratios that are declining and the challenge of winning new deposits, which indicates a “resilience in the cooperative model in a time of crisis”.
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Notes
- 1.
The Banker, FT Business, January 2013.
- 2.
Net income returning to group (or group share) does not take into account earnings returning to minority interests.
- 3.
The central body carrying out the inspection, control and representation duties is determined by French law. Listed entities CASA and BPCE represent the Crédit Agricole group and the Banques Populaires and Caisses d’Epargne groups, respectively. In the case of Crédit Mutuel, the federation, which is a political body, represents the Group as a whole.
- 4.
Bancassurance: the activities of banking and insurance as complementary was launched by Crédit Mutuel at the end of the 1970s and it allows banks to expand services to customer-members and the short cycles of banking complement the long cycles of insurance. Bancassurance is not a juxtaposition of two activities within a financial holding that are foreign to each other but rather an integrated model by which insurance products are sold almost exclusively by the banking network to its customers.
- 5.
Gloukoviezoff (2010) reminds us however that nearly five millions people are excluded not from the French banking system but from credit. The themes of exclusion and over-indebtedness are being widely debated.
- 6.
Annual report BPCE 2014.
- 7.
Published in January 2014 by the Institut Français des Administrateurs (IFA) and drafted under the aegis of Etienne Pflimlin, Honorary Chairman of Crédit Mutuel, this guide recalls the primary role of members and the role of elected officials/Directors representing the members.
- 8.
33 recommendations form the substance of this governance guide.
- 9.
Or where applicable the supervisory board.
- 10.
Thus Crédit Mutuel has formed a partnership with Leclerc supermarkets for payment services.
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Richez-Battesti, N., Leseul, G. (2016). Cooperative Banks in France: Emergence, Mutations and Issues. In: Karafolas, S. (eds) Credit Cooperative Institutions in European Countries. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28784-3_4
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