(Bloomberg) -- CaixaBank SA Chief Executive Officer Gonzalo Gortazar Rotaeche said Europe would benefit from more bank mergers, with Germany in particular in need of such deals.
“Germany’s probably the one that needs most consolidation,” he said at Bloomberg’s Future of Finance summit in Madrid on Wednesday.
The comments come as Germany’s second-largest public bank, Commerzbank AG, is trying to fend off an unsolicited approach by UniCredit SpA. The government in Berlin is opposing the deal and has criticized the stealthy way in which the Italian rival amassed a stake.
Germany is Europe’s largest economy, but it’s struggling to compete with the large international lenders, in part because the market for banking services is characterized by a great number of local and regional savings banks. That’s weighed on profitability and valuations of the larger firms.
The five biggest banks in Germany only share about a third of the country’s total banking assets between them, compared with more than two-thirds in Spain, according to data from the European Central Bank. The German figure is the lowest by far among the large European Union economies.
Gortazar said a combination of Commerzbank and UniCredit would be mostly a domestic deal, because UniCredit already owns a big subsidiary in Germany.
--With assistance from Steven Arons.
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