Unicaja rules out getting involved in a fusion, but will establish alliances to boost their growth in business such as asset management, private banking and consumer credit during the next triennium. “There is a confidence of the shareholders in the project (individualistic) and we do not want anything that distracts us from what we want to do, to extract value for the shareholder, because we are leaving precisely from a merger scenario. It is not on the road map, nor at the top of the table of our main shareholders, “explained the entity’s CEO, Isidro Rubiales on Tuesday.
The Malagueña entity presented the 2024 accounts, with record benefit at 573 million euros and an announcement of historical dividend, of 344 million, and formulated the objectives for the Triennium 2025-2027. Its main goals are raising its profitability from 10.4% to 13%, in a capital calculation on CET1 12.5%, which is the average comparable entities, and distribute up to 85% of the benefit to its shareholders. Its claim is to go further in solvency, up to 14% from 15.1% with which it completed last year, which would dilute said ratio, although the bank did not facilitate estimates for not being comparable to its competitors.
Unicaja is the entity that comes out in a recurring manner in the cabals as the best piece to be annexed by higher entities and precisely its lower profitability. It has been speculated with an eventual integration in Santander and Caixabank, but especially in Sabadell if you can avoid being absorbed by BBVA.
Rubiales did not want to value the OPA in the informative meeting in which the president of Unicaja, José Sevilla, and the Director General of Finance, Pablo González, also participated. “I don’t have anything related to a corporate operation on my head, I have no capacity to comment,” he just said.
Seville found, in turn, differences with the fusion of Caixabank and Bankia, where he was CEO when his shareholders decided precisely that transaction. When questioned about the differences or parallels, he said: “They do not resemble anything, among other things because the operation between CaixaBank and Bankia was not OPA. It was an agreed fusion that was announced at the end of 2020 and materialized in March 2021 . They are operations of a different nature. ”
The focus of Unicaja, they said, is to grow the business, increase profitability once the bank has managed to generate it structurally after closing its fusion stage and spending the page of the brick sanitation, and the main focus will be to improve The remuneration for the shareholder.
The new roadmap of the Malaga entity will put special emphasis on transforming retail banking, reinforcing the client’s brand experience and pushing growth in business with companies. To attack these goals more efficiently, invest almost 250 million euros in artificial technology and intelligence, and strengthen its template with 300 net hiring.
One of the keys to push the activity will be to look for allies in asset management, private banking and consumer credit, without selling the business via Joint Ventures. His intention is rather to replicate agreements such as the one recently agreed with the American specialist FISVer to boost the payment media and autonomous business -in acquired.
In retail banking, it ambitions to capture 200,000 new net customers, raise its market share in 6% mortgages (+40 basic points), 2% in consumer credit (+60 basic points) duplicating its new production and getting increases in 4 % in the income of the unit. In companies, it wants to raise the market share in 50 basic points in the triennium and raise the financing fee with its own customers, among other goals.
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