In an ultra-competitive environment, and despite starting from a dominant position, CaixaBank was able to grow in Spain across the board, even as BBVA’s hostile takeover bid for Banco Sabadell rippled across the Spanish banking sector.
CaixaBank ended 2024 with a market share of almost 25% in deposits, with similar slices in loans, investments and life insurance.
A combined BBVA-Sabadell will still be some way behind CaixaBank in terms of its overall business in Spain. Clearly, it has no need to seek growth at the expense of margins. But for chief executive Gonzalo Gortázar, these market-share gains are proof of the effectiveness of its customer proposition.
“Whether or not you can gain market share is the ultimate acid test to tell if what you are doing as a bank is successful and works well,” he tells Euromoney.
CaixaBank is doing better than ever. Net attributable profit rose to €5.79 billion, up 20% on 2023. Return on equity hit a record 15.4% in 2024, with the cost/income ratio falling to 38.5%. Customer funds, as well as consumer and SME lending, all rose.
In areas such as bancassurance, CaixaBank is one of the main models for other European banks looking to reinternalise product factories. In 2024, net inflows to mutual funds, savings insurance and pension plans roughly doubled to €11.4 billion. It was also a standout year for wealth management, where revenues reached €1.8 billion, up 12%, with wealth management balances rising strongly by 11.7% to €263 billion.
The firm’s scale – above all, in Spain – means it can afford to invest in technology
CaixaBank’s dominant position in Spain is largely down to its transformational takeover of Bankia four years ago. With that integration out of the way, it has been better able to focus on its core businesses – while meeting and surpassing its medium-term targets on business volumes, efficiency, profitability and risk, as well as capital distributions.
In its latest strategic plan, unveiled in November, it was able to take a longer-term view on how it can develop its business. One element of that is deepening its relationship with customers by embedding its franchise more deeply into activities adjacent to finance, such as the car- and house-buying process – following on from an app redesign last year, including research functions using generative artificial intelligence that aim for a more intuitive customer journey.
These ecosystem plays are more achievable for CaixaBank because of its domestic scale. Brokers can benefit from its customer base. And the initiatives are arguably simpler to roll out because of a relative lack of distraction from public M&A battles, and thanks to its simpler geographic focus, in Spain and Portugal.
The firm’s scale – above all, in Spain – means it can afford to invest in technology. Indeed, its latest plan will see the bank step up its investment in tech by €1 billion during the next three years, reaching €5 billion.
“When we’re announcing €5 billion in technology investment, the fact that we are doing that in one market really leads to a lot of scale efficiencies,” Gortázar says.
“We have the luxury of having the full concentration of our business in our Iberian market. Banks are complex institutions, touching every aspect of life. If you add to that dimension, too many territories and countries with different dynamics, it makes life harder for management.”
