the bet on the return of Crédit commercial de France after twenty years of absence

2024-01-04 15:00:12
An exterior view of the headquarters of Crédit Commercial de France, in Paris, on April 2, 2000, in Paris. JACK GUEZ / AFP

This is the third big movement in just over six months in the French banking landscape: after the announcement of the end of the Orange Bank adventure in June 2023 and that of a plan to cease activities of Ma French Bank by La Banque Postale in December 2023, the retail banking activities of HSBC France − and its 3,400 employees − were officially transferred on January 1, 2024 to My Money Group (MMG).

For this new departure, the culmination of a sale process started in 2021, MMG, owned by the American investment fund Cerberus, is betting on relaunching a brand that has been absent for twenty years: that of Crédit commercial de France (CCF), created in 1917 but which disappeared after its purchase in 2000 for 11 billion euros by HSBC.

The multinational with dual roots in Hong Kong and London announced at the beginning of 2020 its intention to withdraw from the French retail banking market and the proposed sale to MMG was presented in June 2021. But the rise in interest rates had put into question causes the financial balance of the project, which led the two parties to renegotiate it in spring 2023.

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Once authorizations were received from the Prudential Control and Resolution Authority at the end of November and from the European Central Bank on December 1, the effective transition took place during the weekend of December 30 and 31 with an IT “switchover” from the HSBC platform to that of Arkéa Banking Services, a subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, which had been the subject of four “blank” rehearsals since March 2023. Some 500 employees of HSBC and MMG, out of a total of 4,000, were deprived of New Year’s Eve leave, in IT services and some of the network’s approximately 250 agencies.

Executives and liberal professions

“Everything went smoothly”declares to Monde Niccolo Ubertalli, the general director of MMG, an Italian whose career has taken him to thirteen different countries and arrived at the head of the group French at the beginning of 2023. “We recorded 187,000 connections to the remote banking service and 50,000 telephone calls [mardi 2 janvier], everything was well managed: customers have already started using their new bank. »

These customers, 800,000 according to MMG, “more like 740,000 today” according to a union source, had been prepared in advance for this delicate transfer. A long letter received at the end of October presented them with the developments for which they had to prepare, from the change of account number to the modifications to the conditions of use of their bank card through the transfer of savings accounts.

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