Awards for Excellence 2019
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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.
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Gonzalo Gortázar |
The 2016 launch of imaginBank, meanwhile, was a crucial milestone in its digitalization strategy, adding to the firm’s appeal for a new generation of millennial clients. The number of its branches and those of its acquired banks has fallen by 42% since 2011.
The separation of La Caixa Banking Foundation’s board also happened in 2016, with the ECB recognizing CaixaBank’s prudential deconsolidation from the foundation’s bank holding company, Criteria Caixa, in 2017.
Chief executive Gonzalo Gortázar has also overseen the bank’s sale and separation from non-strategic minority stakes in financial companies since 2015, including France’s Boursorama, while stakes in Bank of East Asia and Mexico’s Grupo Financiero Inbursa were sold to Criteria Caixa.
The sale of a large stake in Spanish energy company Repsol was a culmination of this strategy late last year, as the bank reduced its stake from 9.36% to 1.1%. The year has also seen it acquire 100% of Portugal’s Banco BPI, in which it previously held a majority stake. The new ownership allows for particular synergies in product factories such as insurance and asset management.
Overall, CaixaBank’s capital tied to stakes has fallen from around 16% in 2014 to below 3% today. Its non-performing exposure ratio fell below 5% in 2018, thanks to a €7 billion non-performing real estate asset sale to Lone Star, which earned it an upgrade from ratings agency Moody’s.
