Abstract
This snapshot paints a picture of the economic and financial impact of the Covid-19 crisis of 2020/2021 on 18 European cooperative banking groups on the one hand, and all their banking competitors on the other. Unfortunately, this health crisis has seamlessly transitioned into another crisis with far-reaching economic and geopolitical consequences: the war in the centre of Europe. Using the 2021 data as a reference point, we will briefly look ahead to the likely implications of current economic realities for the 2022 data. In any case, cooperative banks posted remarkably good results in 2021. The membership base continued to grow as ever. The number of members increased by 1.4 per cent to 88 million in 2021. The domestic market shares stabilized at record levels. The average Tier 1 ratio even reached a new all-time high of 17.3. The cost-to-income ratio improved considerably by 2 percentage points to 62. The average return on equity of both co-operative banks and all other banks rose to the highest levels in years (i.e., 6.8% and 6.5%, respectively). The disparity in lending and deposit growth between cooperative banks and the collective banking sector is a structural phenomenon. Loan growth of cooperative banks accelerated sharply to 6.7%, i.e., the largest expansion since 2011. The whole banking sector increased its loan portfolio by 4.1%. The deposit base of cooperative banks and all other banks grew by 7% and 5.9%, respectively.
Author
Prof. dr. Hans Groeneveld is Professor of Cooperative Financial Services. He studied quantitative macroeconomics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and a PhD in the monetary economy at the University of Maastricht. His professional career began at the CPB in the department Labour and Social Security. He then worked for over ten years at De Nederlandsche Bank in the monetary respectively supervision directorate. Currently he is also Associate Director Cooperative & Control at Rabobank. There he is involved in strategic and organizational projects. He represents Rabobank in many networks in the national and international cooperative world. Previously, he held various senior and management positions at Rabobank. He was Senior Consultant Corporate Strategy, Dep. Chief Economist, Head of SME Sector Management and Director of International Services.
Prof. dr. Groeneveld is a board member of the International Raiffeisen Union in Germany, member of the EACB Academic Advisory Group in Brussels, member of the Scientific Committee of the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises in Italy, and the Co-operative Business Education Consortium in Canada. He has published extensively on monetary policy, banking, cooperative banks and strategic and organizational issues in academic and policy journals.