Cooperative Banks in France: Emergence, Mutations and Issues

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”.