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 think tank of the European Cooperative Banks 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.
Abstract
This research letter presents consolidated financial indicators of 18 co-operative banking groups in 13 European countries for 2019.
It is intended for co-operative bankers, policy makers, regulators and academics. The member base of all co-operative banks expanded by 1.3 percent to almost 86 million. The market shares in domestic retail banking stabilised at the record levels reached in 2018. In 2019, key banking ratios did not differ significantly between co-operative banking groups and the entire banking sector. The average Tier 1 ratio of co-operative banks remained at a record level of 15.9, while the same ratio for all other banks almost equalled this level by 15.6 in 2019. It is small consolation to observe that banks have entered the global health and economic crisis caused by covid-19 in 2020 at least with solid capital buffers. The average cost-to-income ratio of co-operative banks declined by one percentage point to 64.3, whereas this metric increased slightly to 62.1 for all other banks. Co-operative banks reported the same average return on equity as in 2018 (6.1%), whereas this ratio dropped by 0.6 percentage point to 5.7% for all other banks. Lending and deposit growth at co-operative banks accelerated. Both categories of banks closed down around 4% of their branches.