There are currently eight building societies in the public sector.
(Photo: dpa)
Frankfurt The two Landesbausparkassen (LBS) in Bavaria and Southwest are aiming for a merger. This was announced by their owners on Monday. LBS Südwest is owned by the savings banks from Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, while the shares in LBS Bayern are held by the Bavarian savings banks.
A merged company would have total assets of 37 billion euros and would be by far the largest of the state building societies. It would count 3.5 million home savings contracts. There are currently eight building societies in the public sector. LBS West and LBS Nord are also talking about a merger.
Given its size, a merged LBS Südwest-Bayern would be directly overseen by the European Central Bank’s (ECB) banking regulator. From a balance sheet total of 30 billion euros, financial institutions in the euro zone are subject to direct ECB supervision.
The largest building society in Germany is the cooperative Schwäbisch-Hall. It is a subsidiary of the central institute of the Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken, the DZ Bank.
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The Landesbausparkasse Bayern and Südwest together currently have around 1,500 employees. “Terminations due to a possible merger are excluded,” explained the savings bank associations involved.
Small step towards further consolidation
The merger is a small step on the way to further consolidation within the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. In addition to 367 locally anchored savings banks, there are currently nine public insurers, four large state banks and eight state building societies. The cooperative banks, the fiercest competitors of the savings banks, get by with one central institute, one insurer and one building society.
Savings Bank President Helmut Schleweis wants to continue to advocate for a merger of the public-sector institutes, which he believes should be merged into one Savings Bank central institute. But the resistance in several places is great.
Ultimately, the shareholders of the state banks would have to decide on mergers. These are the federal states and the savings banks in the respective regions. The talks promoted by Schleweis about a merger between the Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen and the savings bank fund provider Deka, which would have created a nucleus for a central institute, were put on hold as early as 2020.
More: Ost-Sparkassen: The ECB should not raise interest rates too quickly