Banco Credicoop

Banco Credicoop (Creditco-op Bank) is an Argentine cooperative bank. After the 2001 crisis in Argentina, it became the second private bank in the country behind Banco Macro Bansud and the first with completely national public capital. It is the most important cooperative bank in Latin America.

Banco Credicoop

Company type	Credit union
Industry	Banking Insurance Pension funds
Founded	Buenos Aires, Argentina (March 19, 1979)
Headquarters	Buenos Aires
Key people	Carlos Heller, President Ricardo Sapei, 1st Vice-Pres. Horacio Giura, 2ndVice-Pres.
Products	Retail Banking Insurance Investments Accounting & Payroll Mortgages Consumer Finance Credit cards
Revenue	US$416 million (2008) US$273 million (2008)
Net income	US$37.5 million (2008)
Total assets	US$3.1 billion (2008)
Total equity	US$269 million (2008)
Number of employees	5,000 (2014)
Website	www.bancocredicoop.coop

Origin

Banco Credicoop has its origin in the Credit Unions. In 1976 the Argentinean military government tried to eliminate credit unions, an area of the cooperative sector. This prompted a defensive action that led to the merger of credit cooperatives in order to survive, giving rise to Banco Credicoop in 1979, from the merger of the 44 credit unions that existed in the Capital and in Greater Buenos Aires. Aires, some of which had been created in the early 20th century.

Activities

Towards the mid-1940s, with the election of Juan Domingo Perón, the Credit Unions began to reflect the industrial development that took place in the country, originating an accelerated growth and diversification of the sectors served.

Starting in 1958, the creation of the Cooperative Funds Mobilization Institute (IMFC) as a second-tier cooperative caused a real explosion in the number and geographical dispersion of the entities. From that moment, the cooperative credit unions developed a new type of operation based on capturing resources through sight accounts, compensated by a national clearinghouse of payment orders.

This allowed them to dispose of between 9% and 11% of the total deposits in the financial system, which the savings banks channeled to finance small and medium-sized companies, cooperatives and individuals. The development of cooperativism in a sector as sensitive as the financial one provoked the early opposition of national and foreign banks, as well as sectors of the big bourgeoisie, which generated a series of regulations and restrictive actions on the part of the Argentine State that reached their culminating point from the coup d'état of 1966.

The civic-military dictatorship that governed Argentina between June 1966 and March 1973 –which intended to reorganize Argentine society– attacked credit cooperatives in their double character: as a financial company oriented to the development of small and medium-sized national companies, wage earners and entities of the social economy, a sector that had no place in the economic plans of the self-proclaimed “Argentine Revolution”; and as a social movement that had to freeze its activity –along with all the other social and political institutions of the country– during the stage of “economic time” imposed by the dictatorship. In short, of the 974 credit unions that operated in 1966, only 417 were able to survive the dictatorship. Their share of total deposits in the financial system had fallen from more than 10% to just under 2%.