ABSTRACT
Introduction As seen in Chapter 1, the long and rich history of ‘alternative banks’ has not ended in the 1980s but has taken a di erent turn. Since the liberalization of banking across Europe, domestic regulators and alternative bank managers have pursued a wide variety of policies and strategies. Some public savings banks, notably in France, opted for conversion into cooperatives. In Sweden, Belgium, Italy and Spain, savings banks were privatized. However, in Italy shares were granted to savings bank foundations designed to rea rm and separate the traditional social role of savings banks from banking operations. And Spanish Cajas de Ahorro retain signi cant social mandates and regional and local corporate governance while competing with each other and private banks across regions. In Portugal, Ireland and Greece, alternative banks were modernized only to confront severe downturns since the 2008 crisis. German savings and cooperative banks retained their legal forms (mostly independent local or regional public companies) to consolidate and deepen wholesale networks and associations. In the Netherlands the Rabobank cooperative bank group declined during the 1990s, only to recover large market shares and globalize a er 2000. is wide variety of policies, reforms and alternative bank strategies amidst the convergence of bank regulations under the European Community, single currency and revolution in information and communication technologies provides an exceptional quasi-experimental opportunity for further research and comparison. However, one phenomenon stands out: instead of declining or being replaced by more e cient joint-stock private banks and market-centred nance, alternative banks have rea rmed their traditional business models, corporate behaviour and values, and modernized to retain or expand market share. In the following sections, we take a closer look at the strategies developed by savings
banks, cooperative banks and development banks in reaction to market-centred reforms of the last decades, before examining the existing empirical evidence on the comparative performance of alternative banks before the 2007-8 crisis. e nal section examines the consequences of the crisis on alternative banks in Europe and North America.
