Blog post

Catalonia and the Spanish banking system

As tensions rise around Catalonia's independence movement, there are worries about the impact on the Spanish banking sector. Banks based in Catalonia

Publishing date
06 October 2017

The recent turmoil in Catalonia is raising concern across Europe. Foremost is, of course, the desire for a peaceful solution to the dispute. But there are also major worries around the Spanish banking industry. The two largest banks headquartered in Catalonia, CaixaBank and Banco de Sabadell, have are already making plans to move their headquarters to the Balearic Islands and Madrid respectively. So, how are banks based in Catalonia affected by this crisis?

In this blog post, I present a statistical overview of  the Spanish banking system. To get a better idea of how big the Catalonian banking sector is compared to the rest of Spain, we use data provided by SNL. This  covers 87 financial enterprises, including different types of banks, credit cooperatives and public financial institutions. The balance sheet size in terms of the total assets owned by the top 20 banks in Spain can be found on the table below.

Among 85 Spanish banking industry institutions (for which SNL provides data on total assets), 6 are headquartered in Catalonia. Their share in assets of the Spanish banking system is about 14% (Figure 1).

The Catalonia-based financial institutions include the two largest Catalonian lenders: CaixaBank and Banco de Sabadell. Then come Institut Català de Finances, which is a public financial institution owned by the government of Catalonia, Banco Mediolanum SA, which offers personal banking services, Caja de Arquitectos S. Coop. and Caja Rural de Guissona SCC.

CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell have already been heavily affected by the political risks, as their stock prices lost some 5% recently. These two banks’ total assets represent a relatively significant proportion of the total assets of banks in Spain: 13.8%.

However, non-Catalan banks are also caught up in the Catalonian drama. In fact, many of the large Spanish banks have significant activities, including offices and lending, in Catalonia.

Moving headquarters out of Catalonia may help Catalonian bank preserve access to the ECB liquidity window if the situation escalates. But the exposure of all Spanish banks through their business with Catalonia will remain significant.

About the authors

  • Yana Myachenkova

    Yana Myachenkova, a Russian citizen, works as a Research Assistant at Bruegel. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, with an exchange program at the Erasmus School of Economics and visiting studies at UCLA, and a Master in Economic Theory and Econometrics from the Toulouse School of Economics (Université Toulouse 1 Capitole).

    Both Yana’s bachelor and master theses focused on answering the central questions of contract theory, using some insights from psychology and examining such topics as the emergence of the bonus culture.

    Her research interests lie in the areas of applied microeconomics. Yana is primarily interested in such research fields as Regulation, Incentives, Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Contract Theory and Industrial Organization.

    She is fluent in Russian and English, and has basic knowledge of French.

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