Continue on debate on the self-reform of the mutual banks. And the first result is that there is still no result, despite the intentions to proceed quickly to deal with the structural problems of which an increasing number of cooperative credit experts declare themselves aware. But, when it comes to tailoring a new garment, nothing strange if the preferences of the various interested parties do not coincide right away and the tailor is repeatedly called upon to modify the basted model, up to taking into account the aesthetic/functional needs of as many actors as possible.
The fact that the operation is not the simplest is evident from the fact that at the moment there are several paper models on the tailor's table, among other things, up to now, hardly distinguishable from each other. But maybe that's not the problem either. The problem is: with the reforms underway, are we aiming to sew a dress on a body with many humps or are we trying to modify those deformities?
To avoid the accusation of indulging in analyzes and being unproactive, I will not dwell too much on the critical factors reiterated several times and with determination by the Bank of Italy, if not to mention the most important ones such as the gigantism, self-referentiality, the absence of breathing strategies, the pride of having brought the head of the system under European supervision, the lack of investment in the operating machine, the absence of a policy for the efficient resolution of the increasingly numerous and significant banking crises, the lack of control over the Governance of important components of the system, protagonists of conflicts of interest of destructive scope, the time lost in the attempts, remained on paper, to introduce new aggregation models such as the Institutional Fund. And I stop here, aware that I have limited myself in some way.
So let's try to talk about what attempts to redesign the system are missing in order to start a credible renewal phase. Above all, the design of its industrial reconfiguration is missing.
As if to say that the governance changes, if not accompanied by an industrial proposal that immediately identifies the investment and divestment plans, in terms of business and governance of the operating machine, only to remain on the macro-categories of any economic activity, risk turning into facade operations.
How does the foreseen loss of autonomy of the territorial components of cooperative credit translate into numbers in favor of greater efficiency hoped for by the centralization of strategic choices and system control actions?
There are quantitative exercises on the basis of which the presumed can be highlighted benefits of a transformation operation of the prefigured scope? If there are (and, one might say, how could they not be), because they are not yet exposed and discussed. Why not address the issue of structural costs, the necessary downsizing of all local and central components? Indeed, why not start from the need for efficiency and turnover in the central bodies of the movement?
In short, who is reckoning with the available resources, with the strategic projects to be selected and launched, with the operational processes to be transformed also from a technological point of view?
Some time ago, in the mood for censuses, I came to list some aspects of hypertrophism, a senile disease of banking cooperativism. With growing surprise, I discovered the size of thearmy of councilors and auditors in office at BCC and central bodies, as well as those of the galaxy of product, service, representation, institutional, associative companies, and so on, all fueled by the basic business of the 381 CBs alive at the end of 2014. And this without saying anything about the approximately 4500 branches of the latter (15% of the system) authorized on the basis of the enormous industrial plans of the last fifteen years, and the crowd of employees of the cooperative credit as a whole (over 30.000 units). A unit cost of the cooperative credit product much higher than the average of the system!
A second point concerns the poor reception that the European Union is reserving to the methods of preservation of the species BCC, believing that interventions in crises, implemented with the only instrument, with compulsory membership, of the Guarantee Fund for depositors, are configured as state aid. Therefore, if we want to continue to act by systematically intervening in support of the defaulted intermediary rather than limiting ourselves to the rights of savers worthy of protection (those with deposits of up to 100.000 euros), Europe tells us that this can be done on condition that pay for the crisis first to the bank's shareholders and creditors through the now famous bail-in (chesta for bailout from within) and only later, and voluntarily, to the other CCBs.
As at 30 June, they were not in compliance with the parameters of the Guarantee Fund (and therefore at risk of autonomous survival) 145 CCBs, equal to 38% of the entire cooperative system; moreover, of all the financial interventions disbursed by the Fund in its twenty-year existence, 84% were concentrated in the last five years, with a growing allocation of resources to support larger-than-average banks in the north of the country. In 2014 alone, there were 9 interventions approved to allow for the solution of the most critical situations for around 200 million euros to be paid by the remaining consortium members.
In short, the "BCC soldier" could be increasingly abandoned to his fate, to alleviate the burden of increasingly onerous financial support for the other sisters. Solidarity also has a cost and resources are increasingly scarce.
This demonstrates that the autarkic preservation of the species, in addition to producing costly inefficiencies, collides with European principles, all the more difficult to counter the more one takes into account the fact that cooperative credit has now come to occupy third place among Italian banks in terms of dimensions . How can cooperative banking remain an enclave separate from the others, with its own specific rules and, in some ways, off the market, once it has grandly proclaimed itself a component at systemic risk for the country's financial stability? Perhaps the size could also prevent you from benefiting from the containment of regulation costs, according to the so-called proportionality principle.
So also from this point of view it will be necessary to quickly take into consideration the rationalization, consolidation and downsizing of the current production system.
Third point. The role of national supervision in the issue of ongoing self-reforms.
Once it has formally received the project self-produced by the movement (up to now it does not appear that any concrete proposal has been deposited on the table of the Sarto Vigilante), it combines it with its ruthless analysis of the structural weaknesses of the system and immediately establishes the rules to accompany this "self-packaging". That is to say, how any national and regional sub-holdings should operate equally, with which rules of subjection to supervisory controls, with which guarantees of ex ante industrial effectiveness (patrimony, number and composition of members, etc.), to avoid sensational failures and further unsustainable redundancies. And the Supervisory Body also outlines the ways out for those who do not want to adhere to new cooperative credit governance schemes.
I am certain that the Authority will only be able to proceed with lucid and conscious determination, also in the recognition that the new regulations, if not accompanied by current and effective policies, will not be able to represent, by themselves, the cure-all for the change in the current condition .
But, at the risk of repeating myself, the ideas are not at all clear at the moment and the dialectic is still unable to even decline the differences between the various positions in the field. So I would risk continuing to talk about a world that doesn't exist.
Returning to the metaphor of self-reform as a new garment to be thrown on the exhausted body of banking cooperativism, I would not even want to recall the Greek myths of Hercules and Dejanira and of Medea and Jason on the dangerousness of new clothes received as a gift, which, by sticking to the body, not only they determine its regeneration, but even cause its definitive destruction. Above all, it must be avoided that the most virtuous components of the movement are at the expense of the changes, which, having been able to measure their own strengths with greater wisdom, have not pursued dreams of grandeur, remaining firmly anchored to the role of local bank and to its own social responsibility to guarantee over time not only credit support to the reference economies, but also the jobs gradually created in its operating structures. And this is the real BCC soldier to safeguard!
