Awards for Excellence 2019
Spain’s banking sector can rest assured that it has been in the vanguard of the wider transformation of Europe’s banking sector since the 2008 and 2011 crises – in particular in the shift away from the model of regionally focused and foundation-controlled savings banks.
The bank that is emblematic of the most successful elements of this Spanish shakeup is CaixaBank, western Europe’s best bank transformation. The last year has seen the rationale and benefits behind CaixaBank’s 2011 listing come to fruition, as it reached a return on equity of almost 10% from low single digits earlier this decade.
Caixa has become a clearer and more attractive story for investors, completing its journey from a quasi-conglomerate, with financial and industrial stakes and a big portfolio of non-core real estate exposures, to a cleaner and more coherent Iberia-wide bancassurance business – one fit for the digital era.
A series of mergers between 2011 and 2015 laid the groundwork for this change, as CaixaBank made good use of its relative health after the eurozone crisis to secure the biggest share of Spanish retail banking across Spain’s regions.