Cooperative and Savings Banks in Europe: Nature, Challenges and Perspectives

This paper presents and discusses the main characteristics of stakeholder-based banks, the challenges they face nowadays and the reform experiences in some European countries. We review the main characteristics and classification of stakeholder-based banks, together with an overview of the stakeholder sector in some European countries. Thereafter we discuss the describes the pros and cons of these kind of entities and present some statistics regarding the performance and the public support received by these institutions during the financial crisis. Finally we conclude by explaining the the main challenges for the future and goes through the reform experience of some European countries.