Strategy
Groupe BPCE came into being in July 2009, the result of the determination of the Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne groups to create, together, the second largest banking group in France: a group of cooperative banking institutions, proud of its historical brands and boasting 117,000 employees at the service of 36 million customers, including 8.1 million cooperative shareholders.
The group recently defined its roadmap until 2013. It points the way to a more accessible, more entrepreneurial, more efficient group driven by its ambition to contain the banking institutions most preferred by the French and their companies.
Named “Together,” Groupe BPCE’s strategic plan is greater than the individual ambitions of its component parts. It gives expression to the added value created from the inclusion of Natixis at the service of the retail banking networks, the pooling of good practices, the sharing of certain developments and certain expenses. It is by taking full advantage of the quality of its assets that Groupe BPCE will be stronger, more efficient and more profitable, allowing it to build its future on secure foundations. As such, it will become even more attractive both to its customers and to its employees.
The group must rise to meet two major challenges: firstly, the need to adapt to its customers’ expectations and reinforce the relationship founded on trust and a local presence that already represent the strength of the Caisses d’Epargne and Banque Populaire banks rooted, as they are, in the very heart of the French regions, secondly, the need for the group to boost its financial resources and to give itself the room for maneuver required for its future development, while simultaneously reimbursing the French state.
To succeed, the group must simplify its organizational structure to make it more efficient and easier to understand. It has decided to refocus its activities on its core commercial banking businesses and to develop synergies between the different activities it pursues.
More accessible, the group will mobilize the energy of all its entities around service quality and customer relations, which both must rise to the highest standards. It will pursue a strategy aimed at winning new customers and retaining its existing clientele by developing new relationship channels with a view to building the bank of the future.
More entrepreneurial, the group will base its action on strong fundamentals in order to expand its activities in international retail banking and to satisfy more fully the needs of micro-companies and SMEs at crucial moments in the lives of entrepreneurs and their businesses. Groupe BPCE will also continue to provide proof of its commitment to ‘green growth’, an area in which it fully intends to acquire benchmark status.
More efficient, the group intends to intensify commercial relations between Natixis and the group’s banking institutions in order to develop its product and service offerings and to generate additional recurring revenues. At the same time, expenses will be substantially reduced thanks to the optimization of its organization and processes, and thanks to the pooling of infrastructures and the optimization of information systems.
Our business is founded on trust, our customers entrust us with their savings, which we plough back into economic development in the form of loans. The way to earn this trust and make it grow is quite straightforward: we must simply do our job as bankers, do it well, and do nothing but the business of banking. More accessible, more entrepreneurial, more efficient, we will then become the banking institutions most preferred by the French and their companies.
François Pérol, Chairman of the Management Board of BPCE
