I apologize for beginning these lines with that cursed word: pandemic. However, if it was already very difficult to draw up plans or make forecasts more than a year in advance before the pandemic, COVID-19 has shown that an unforeseen factor can radically change the expected scenario and place us in one that was unimaginable just a few days or weeks prior. After this experience, which will be difficult to forget, the team at El Economista has asked me to venture a forecast for the banking sector over the next 15 years, coinciding with their fifteenth anniversary. Making a fifteen-year forecast in a post-COVID world seems almost reckless. In any case, I shall comply with the request now that the appropriate safeguards have been established.
To try to minimize these risks, I propose a simpler exercise. I simply believe that the future of the Spanish banking sector is contained within its past and its present. In fifteen years, Spanish banks will essentially do the same thing they have been doing until now, although certainly in a very different way: accompanying their clients through the permanent transformation of economic activity and meeting the needs that arise for families and businesses along the way.
This has been the case until now. Our banks have accompanied Spanish companies in their expansion and internationalization throughout their recent history. But they have also developed efficient payment methods that have made life easier for citizens and provided tremendous value to the Spanish economy. Furthermore, they have made access to housing possible for more than 80% of Spanish families. Our entities have also been capable of surviving a dramatic international financial crisis, from which they emerged stronger and better prepared, after meeting the demanding requirements of new banking regulations.
That preparation and strength were well demonstrated during the early stages of the pandemic, when our banks, with a large part of their workforce working from home, were able to replicate their normal activity and continued providing services to their clients thanks to technological infrastructures that operated at full capacity and without incident. Our banks were thus able to advance the payment of pensions, ERTEs (furlough schemes), and other social benefits, and offered moratoriums, beyond those legally required, to holders of mortgage and consumer loans. But their most relevant action was undoubtedly when, together with the ICO, they set up a system in just a few weeks to provide liquidity—120 billion euros—in record time (a few months) to more than 600,000 companies, most of them micro-SMEs. This rapid action guaranteed the survival of a very significant part of the productive fabric that had been most intensely affected by the pandemic. That is, it allowed many companies to survive the harsh months of lockdown and face the halt in activity, if not with hope, then certainly with future prospects.
At this moment, the efforts of Spanish banks are focused on accompanying companies and families in the process of reactivating the Spanish economy. Fortunately, we have frameworks to work with, such as the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan designed by the Government, as well as the NextGenerationEU funds, which will be the largest stimulus package ever financed to make Europe greener, more digital, and more resilient.
The use of these funds represents, due to their volume and conditionality, an enormous challenge for the Administration, as well as an extraordinary opportunity that Spanish society cannot afford to miss. The proper use of these funds will require an enormous collective effort and the implementation of public-private partnership schemes. Spanish banks have already expressed on numerous occasions their willingness to contribute to this project, as they have the means to reach companies, particularly small and medium-sized ones. Their widely proven capacity to analyze and assess projects is undoubtedly an additional strength that must be taken into account.
Furthermore, the green revolution and digital transformation, the two main pillars of the NextGenerationEU plan, are also the areas that make up the transformation strategy of the Spanish banking sector. Because if there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that in 15 years, our banks will be greener and more digital, and in those years they will have contributed decisively to the progress of Spanish companies and families in both processes. Fifteen years have already passed, for which I express my most sincere congratulations to the team at El Economista, and fifteen years of a near future for which I wish them every success.
José María Roldán, President of the AEB
