With retail banking operations in Belgium, France, Italy and Luxembourg, BNP Paribas is the clear leader among a very small handful of European banks that have grown beyond being national champions in their home markets to serve personal customers across the continent.
That brings the challenges of achieving scale efficiency that few rival management teams are willing to take on. But it also adds some diversification to the risks the group carries on its balance sheet, as well as to its earnings.
For example, in Belgium, BNP Paribas Fortis was able to fully integrate bpost banque in 2022, having previously offered its services to post office customers through a joint venture. That saw big growth in both loans and deposits in Belgium and a 9% increase in annual profit there.
In 2022, the bank overall grew group revenues ahead of costs and, even after taking a hit from various exceptional items, still reported net income 7.5% higher than in 2021.
Commenting on those results, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, chief executive, says: “Thanks to its solidity, the strength of its diversified and integrated model, and the expertise of our teams, BNP Paribas achieved a very good performance in 2022. This performance reflects our unique positioning as a European leader.”
Then, in the first quarter of 2023, when the panic over deposit flight from US regional banks threatened to spread to Europe, BNPP benefited from a flight to quality, registering an increase of deposit flows in March from both corporate and retail clients. Its private banking business also saw inflows of net new money driven by wealth management and mass-affluent clients.
The group also looked stronger once the sale of the Bank of the West was completed in February 2023, boosting its common equity tier-1 ratio by 170 basis points to 13.6% and bringing a group that had once looked a laggard by this measure into line with its peers.
But it is as a wholesale bank that BNPP really stands out as Western Europe’s best bank. It is by a wide margin the highest-ranked European bank in the syndicated loan arranger rankings and stands together with Barclays at the top of the European debt capital markets tables, having led more deals in the awards period than any other bank.
Thanks to its solidity, the strength of its diversified and integrated model, and the expertise of our teams, BNP Paribas achieved a very good performance in 2022
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé
It is renowned as a leader in sustainable finance and green bonds, and this extends to working with corporate treasury teams at the leading companies now emerging through Europe’s energy transition.
Transaction services is the new battle ground between banks in Europe’s fragmented national markets. Hampered by manual bank account processes, rapidly expanding Norwegian renewable energy firm Scatec ASA knew a digital onboarding solution would ease its pain points. Scatec’s relationship with BNPP provided an elegant answer – Welcome. This is a digital platform designed by BNPP to simplify the onboarding process by enabling the paper-free collection of know-your-customer documents, account opening and e-banking subscriptions.
Mediahuis is a European media group with businesses in the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium. The last decade saw it acquire a number of companies, a result of which was a very decentralized treasury organization. With hundreds of accounts divided among different banks, a lot of cash was trapped within different legal entities.
BNPP designed a solution with a multi-entity, multicurrency cash pool to free all that trapped cash. This included automated currency conversion to avoid manual processes. More than 60 accounts in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, UK and Germany were opened with a central digital onboarding approach and more than 10 million direct debits were centralized within BNPP.
