The former Italian finance minister believes that Europe’s banks need more courage to merge.
(Photo: Reuters)
Frankfurt The head of the supervisory board of the major Italian bank Unicredit wants international bank mergers in Europe. According to Pier Carlo Padoan, money houses in the euro zone need to become more European, not national.
Fewer cross-border deals would seem like a rejection of the completion of the European banking union, said the former Italian finance minister in an interview with the newspaper “La Stampa”. Unicredit only refrained from undertaking a transaction to rescue the Italian crisis bank Monte dei Paschi in October.
The banking supervisors of the European Central Bank have also been in favor of pan-European mergers for some time, as this is the only way to fill the banking union with life. Most bankers have so far been skeptical about quick cross-border mergers. There are still too many regulatory and legal obstacles that prevent large transformational takeovers from paying off.
Unicredit is the mother of the Münchener Hypo-Vereinsbank (HVB). The Italians have already been said to be interested in taking over Commerzbank several times without any concrete negotiations with the second-largest German private bank, in which the state still holds a stake of around 15 percent after the rescue operation in the financial crisis.
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At the beginning of 2019, Commerzbank had discussed a merger with its larger local rival Deutsche Bank, but the negotiations failed. Now the institute is in the middle of a painful restructuring.
By the end of 2024, the number of full-time positions at Commerzbank is expected to drop to 32,000. The bank wants to shrink the branch network in Germany from 790 to 450. In an interview with Handelsblatt, CEO Manfred Knof had just emphasized that he wanted to defend Commerzbank’s independence.
Reconstruction at the major Italian bank
Unicredit is also facing a renovation again. The new boss Andrea Orcel has set ambitious goals for the major bank: 16 billion euros should flow to shareholders by 2024, almost twice as much as originally planned.
At the same time, Orcel wants to significantly reduce costs – especially in Germany. For HVB, this means the next workforce reduction within a few years. At the same time, 1,500 new employees are to be hired across the group for customer-oriented business and another 2,100 in the IT area.
Some of these jobs are also being created in Germany, but Orcel admitted that the bottom line is that jobs will be lost. The manager did not want to give exact figures. In media reports there was talk of job losses between 1,000 and 1,500 at Hypo-Vereinsbank.
More: Commerzbank boss warns of increasing risk of inflation – 2022 will be a “challenging year” for his institute