The Regional Council of Campania alongside cooperative credit. It unanimously approved an agenda which commits the Council to take sides in turn alongside the cooperative credit to support local roots and the simplification of the relative regulations. Today, European legislation considers them belonging to a larger group and therefore provides for heavy regulatory consequences. Before Campania, Lombardy also assumed a similar position.
«A special role recognized for the CCBs»
The president of the Federation of Community Banks Campania Calabria, Amedeo Manzo appreciated the provision of the Campania Regional Council: «The group leaders of the Campania Regional Council have approved an agenda regarding the specific role in promoting local development of community banks cooperative credit as local financial institutions inspired by mutualistic principles and values. Our thanks go to all the political forces for this initiative which goes in the direction of support for the Campania region, the economic fabric and all citizens”.
The presence in Campania
There are 11 cooperative credit banks that have their registered office in the Campania region with 153 branches and 329 ATMs spread throughout the territory with a presence in 112 municipalities, in 56 of which they are the only bank present. They represent – this is Manzo’s thesis – «a bank model attentive to social profitability, maintaining local presence at the service of customers even in the last few years of difficult economic conditions, with an active role in favor of the development of local economies, inclusion, promotion of stability and competition’. «Mutual finance – adds Manzo – reinvests the savings in the territory where they were collected since 95% of the loans must be disbursed in the area of competence; furthermore, due to their vocation as institutions in close contact with local communities, cooperative credit banks can play a privileged role of connection with the territories for particularly important activities such as access to social housing, credit for small businesses, support for energy communities, enhancement of small villages in inland areas». Manzo also recalls that the CCBs of the South supported the financing of the real economy both during the period of the double-dip recession between 2008 and 2013, and in the following years marked by the serious pandemic emergency.
Simplification is needed
A document from the CCBs then explains how necessary a change in regulation is. «The operational potential of the BCCs – we read – are negatively limited by a regime of hyper-bureaucratic controls that is completely inconsistent with the characteristics of this peculiar figure of mutual and proximity institutions. These limitations derive from European legislation which imposes completely inappropriate bureaucratic obligations for banks of a similar size and related operational characteristics; these critical issues would not arise if the CBs themselves were not currently qualified by the supervisory rules and practices of the banking union as significant banks, or significant in terms of risk, due to an illogical regulation envisaged by the European Central Bank according to which even the less significant banks, ie with an asset of less than 30 billion euro, such as all the Italian BCCs, which are part of a significant banking group, are in turn classified individually as significant banks. This illogical provision implies that the legal regime of the single bank does not derive, as it would be right, from its characteristic subjective dimensions but from belonging to a larger group with heavy consequences of a supervisory regulatory nature in terms of regulatory, administrative, informational and of capital requirements”.