Unlike individuals, who often work with a single bank (the one that grants them the mortgage), companies with between 2 and 100 million in turnover usually operate with several. Financial institutions tend to limit the volume of credit for each SME as a precaution and to avoid risks of bankruptcy. Therefore, companies need to operate with three or four different banks to cover their needs. When a merger occurs there are fewer options for companies. And what is worse, if a company had loans with BBVA and Banc Sabadell, when they merge, the risk of that company in the new integrated entity doubles. And there is a danger that the new merged bank will eventually ask the company in question to reduce its exposure, thereby closing off some of the financing.
In the case of an absorption of Sabadell by BBVA, the territory where companies could have the most problems in terms of competition is Catalonia. According to financial sources, after the merger, 84 out of every 100 companies would have BBVA-Banc Sabadell as one of their reference banks. CaixaBank would be second, since 75 out of every 100 companies operate with the entity born in Barcelona, but with its headquarters in Valencia. In this type of market share statistics, the sum of these does not equal 100 because companies operate with more than one bank.
They are usually market studies with a certain margin of error. In the case of individual clients, one of these studies shows that after the hypothetical merger, 34% of banking clients in Spain would operate with BBVA-Banc Sabadell. However, CaixaBank would continue to lead the individual segment given that almost 40% of clients maintain that they work with the entity headed by Gonzalo Gortázar. Meanwhile, about 23% of those surveyed respond that they work with Santander.
