Sum and continue in the closure of bank offices. The five largest financial institutions in Spain, Caixabank, Santander, BBVA, Sabadell and Bankinter, have closed nearly 2,500 branches in the last three years, according to the figures they have published in their quarterly results. In total, these five banks had almost 8,900 branches in Spain at the end of this past September. At the end of the same month of 2021, they reached 11,400 offices.
These are years in which their business has changed significantly and where all companies have tended to reinforce their digital activity to the detriment of their physical commercial network.
So at the end of 2021, they had resumed normal activity after the pandemic and saw how the interest rates set by the European Central Bank were at 0%. Since that moment, after the inflationary spiral caused by the war in Ukraine, these rates have been escalating and expanding the banks’ margins and profits. As a comparison, these five large entities earned, among all the businesses and countries where they operate, 11,972 million euros between January and September 2021. This year, in that same period of time, they have added a profit of 23,656 million. That is, in three years they have earned practically double.
In this context, in which they have benefited from the monetary policy decided in Frankfurt, they have been withdrawing their presence through the traditional commercial network. If you look at the data, the bank that has the most branches in Spain is Caixabank, which has 3,571 offices in Spain. It is followed by BBVA, with 1,881 and Santander, with 1,832. The fourth is Sabadell, with 1,155 and the fifth, Bankinter, with 446, a figure that has remained unchanged in recent years. If the merger between BBVA and Sabadell were to materialize, the new bank would become the second entity in Spain by number of offices, with more than 3,030. The following graph summarizes the evolution of the branches in recent years.
The starting point of this comparison is 2021. That is a key year to see how the banking commercial network has been retracting because it was then when the integration of Bankia and Caixabank materialized. Specifically, the latter added more than 2,100 branches of the former.
If you compare the data, at the end of the third quarter of this year, Caixabank has practically the same number of branches as it had in September 2020, when it was still alone, without Bankia. Now there are more than 3,571. Then there were more than 3,600, as detailed in the quarterly information sent to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV). In this way, if the data is seen from September 2021, Caixabank has closed more than 1,800 branches throughout the territory. Sabadell, at 354 and BBVA, 225. And the bank with the least, Santander, with 120.
However, in the case of the entity chaired by Ana Botín, we must look a year earlier, because at the end of 2020 it announced the closure of just over 1,000 offices, in addition to an Employment Regulation File (ERE) for 4,000 people. It was not the only bank that snipped its workforce, because the entire financial sector undertook more than 19,000 layoffs after the pandemic.
Waiting for BBVA’s takeover bid for Sabadell
The process of commercial withdrawal of the financial sector has gone parallel to concentration. It is worth remembering that in the last decade, especially as a consequence of the 2009 financial crisis, the sector has gone from nearly 40 banking entities in Spain to less than a dozen. Now, if the integration between BBVA and Banco Sabadell materializes, this process would experience a new twist. In this topic we tell how a merger would accentuate the lack of competition in the Spanish financial system.
At the moment, the purchase offer (OPA) is still in its initial phases, awaiting the assessment being carried out by the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC), which has to decide whether to approve the terms of the proposal. in a first analysis – in what is called Phase 1 – or expands it to study the integration in more detail – Phase 2 – which would delay the conclusion of the OPA.
At the moment what is known is that BBVA has accounted for how many branches it would close. In total, he points out that 300. He commented on this in the summer, when presenting the results of the first half of fiscal year 2024, when he recognized that he will have to carry out a process of “rationalization” of the commercial network. These are the closures that it foresees, because in total it estimates that it would have 870 offices located at a distance of less than 500 meters from each other. Then, its CEO Onur Genç justified that, if the merger goes ahead, only “a percentage of less than 10% of the sum of the network of both entities” would be closed.
This closure of stores affects rural areas to a greater extent. There the entities have opted for alternative services, such as the so-called ‘ofibuses’ that serve several locations. According to the Bank of Spain, more than 500 mobile offices are already operating. Meanwhile, the Spanish Banking Association estimates that the ‘ofibuses’ provide service to almost 830 small municipalities, where more than 180,000 people live. The forecast of this association for the end of this year is that, in total, there will be 1,500 locations where banks operate with this type of mobile offices.
#bleeding #branches #stop #large #banks #closed #offices #years
