Unlike individuals, who often work with only one bank (the one that grants them the mortgage), companies with a turnover of between 2 and 100 million usually operate with more than one. Financial institutions tend to limit the volume of credit for each SME as a precaution and to avoid bankruptcy risks. For this reason, companies need to operate with three or four different banks to cover their needs.
When a merger takes place there are fewer options for companies. And what is worse, if a company had credits with BBVA and Banco Sabadell, when they merge, the company’s risk to the new integrated entity doubles, and there is a danger that the new merged bank will in the long run demand to the company in question to lower the exposure, so that it closes part of the financing.
In the case of an absorption of Sabadell by BBVA, the territory where the companies could have more problems in terms of competition is Catalonia. According to financial sources, after the merger, 84 out of every 100 companies would have BBVA-Sabadell as one of the reference banks. CaixaBank would be the second, since 75 out of every 100 companies operate with the entity born in Barcelona, ??but with its registered office in Valencia. In this type of market share statistics, the sum does not add up to 100, because companies operate with more than one bank.
They are usually market studies with a certain margin of error. In the case of private customers, one of the studies shows that, after the hypothetical merger, 34% of banking customers in Spain would operate with BBVA-Sabadell. Despite this, CaixaBank would still lead the individual segment, as almost 40% of customers say they work with the entity run by Gonzalo Gortázar. Meanwhile, close to 23% of respondents answered that they work with Santander.
