Awards for Excellence 2020
The coordination of the financial response to the coronavirus crisis has sometimes seemed easier in France than elsewhere in Europe.
That is partly thanks to the way the industry is represented by the French Banking Federation (FBF), whose president is Frédéric Oudéa, chief executive of Societe Generale.
During the pandemic French banks, through the FBF, voluntarily agreed to a six-month repayment holiday on the principal of outstanding loans for businesses and the self-employed.
Oudéa has thrown himself into the FBF’s public affairs work since the Covid-19 outbreak. And his bank has demonstrated an extraordinarily proactive response of its own: rolling out repayment holidays automatically, for example, while clients at other banks still needed to request it.
France’s state-guaranteed loans scheme puts more of an onus on the banks, which, unlike in Germany, Italy and the UK, must still take a 10% portion of the risk, even for smaller borrowers. Nevertheless, SocGen, dealt with 76,000 requests by businesses for a total of about €19 billion of state guaranteed loans this spring.