After more than two years of negotiations, the British banking giant HSBC sold on Monday, for an undisclosed amount, its retail banking network in France to the company My Money Group (MMG), controlled by the American fund Cerberus. The operation is made up of just under 250 agencies, some 800,000 customers, 3,500 employees, and the Crédit commercial de France (CCF) brand, shelved by HSBC when it bought this network a year ago. took around twenty years to establish itself in France. This sale is part of HSBC’s strategy of refocusing on the Asian continent.
The new CCF will aim to target a clientele of professionals, liberals and independents, such as lawyers or doctors, with assets of 50,000 euros or more. “HSBC Continental Europe (HBCE) completed, on January 1, 2024, the sale of its retail banking activities in France to CCF, a subsidiary of Promontoria MMB SAS (My Money Group),” HSBC announced in a joint press release.
MMG has been working for months on the new CCF, under the aegis of Niccolò Ubertalli, formerly of the Italian bank Unicredit, appointed general director of the company in January 2023. The objective is to create a “heritage French bank on a human scale » based on the CCF brand.
Many twists and turns
The sale of HSBC’s retail banking activities in France to My Money Group was a soap opera with many twists and turns. The two parties first announced a memorandum of understanding in June 2021, followed by a first signing in November of the same year. But in the meantime, rising central bank interest rates have made the deal less certain.
A new agreement was finally announced, but the final stretch of the sale was not easy, with in particular an alert procedure launched by elected union officials and an administrative problem linked to banking approval which will prevent the transfer of union officials to the new entity. The CFDT is particularly on the offensive, fearing for the future of the network. According to her, three quarters of automatic teller machines (ATMs), out of service during the “changeover”, would disappear, information not confirmed by management. The French subsidiary was also very expensive for the seller, who had recorded a depreciation of $2.4 billion in the third quarter of 2022.
Long awaited and feared
My Money Group is a company incorporated under French law but owned by the American fund Cerberus, named after the guardian of the underworld in Greek mythology, via a company based in the Netherlands. The transfer is as expected as it is feared by employees. “Expected because only a tiny minority will regret HSBC, feared because we will transfer to a company where we know nothing about the commercial and strategic project,” according to Eric Poyet, FO union representative.
The buyer has remained rather discreet about its commercial strategy, but has set itself a one-year moratorium. It should roll out a three-year recovery plan and rely for its back office on the Breton mutual bank Arkéa. However, this shareholder profile is rarely very long-term.
The Cerberus fund is not its first attempt in the banking sector, since it paid 3.2 billion euros in 2007 to acquire the former Austrian union bank Bawag, threatened with bankruptcy last year. previous year and IPO ten years later. It also purchased from the British Treasury in 2015 a portfolio of mortgage loans from the defunct Northern Rock bank, nationalized in 2008. What followed was a standoff between the fund and a group of borrowers, who criticized their creditor not to apply the new market rates, lower than those they had signed.