Last week the European Banking Federation (EBF) published the 2017 Banking In Europe facts and figures. The facts and figures are nicely summarised in a infographic that i have shared below, but its worth taking note of some of the key themes…
Banking in Europe – Key Themes:
- The number of EU-28 credit institutions has been declining since 2009 and fell some more in 2017
- The number of banks fell by 5% in 2017 to 6,250
- Germany, Italy, Hungary had the largest falls while in the UK the number of credit institutions increased!
- Bank branches are declining
- In 2017 9,100 bank branches closed reducing the overall number of branches to 189,270
- To give that number some perspective, in 2008 there were 237,701 bank branches
- Bank staff declined
- Bank staff numbers fell by 40,000 in 2017
- Banks are “trying” to become digital
- From using the word digital more often in their annual reports (lol) to recruiting adverts for IT and engineering roles at banks (research by Oliver Wyman)
- Banking APIs for third parties increased
- In 2017 the number of banking APIs for 3rd parties jumped to 1,500, there were just 17 APIs ten years ago (research by IBM)
- Blockchain investment grew
- As of 2017 the financial services industry spent about $1.5 billion per year on blockchain
- 92% of the big EU banks are investing in blockchain / distributed ledger technology
- Key themes include recognition among the financial services industry that
- Cybersecurity remains the most important risk
- Big data, cloud and digital skills are the critical to the success of financial services in Europe
