Germanys Three Pillar Banking System

German banks tend to be less profitable than their foreign counterparts. This paper estimates the likely effect of the phaseout of state guarantees for public sector banks, reviews the various ways in which public policy could contribute to their restructuring, and discusses the various arguments for and against public involvement in banking.

This Technical Note focuses on banking sector structure in Germany. Germany’s banking system comprises three “pillars”—private commercial banks, public sector banks, and cooperative banks—distinguished by the ownership structure and business orientation. The German banking system includes a large number of institutions in both absolute and relative terms. This note describes the evolution of Germany’s three-pillar banking system. It analyzes capitalization, credit and the intermediation of savings, and bank profitability and efficiency. It also examines the benefits of public involvement and governance in the banking system.

This paper analyzes the crisis preparedness and crisis management frameworks for German banks. Banks dominate German financial system and represent one of the largest small- and medium-sized banking segments in the EU. The banking sector is a three-pillar system with a total of nearly 1,800 institutions. Both at the EU level and at domestic German level a range of legal instruments have been adopted that collectively establish a complex framework for bank resolution and crisis preparedness and management in financial sector. The Single Supervisory Mechanism Regulation has conferred specific tasks on the European Central Bank concerning prudential supervision of banks including the adoption of early intervention measures and a requirement that banks prepare recovery plans.

In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy - as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance system. Further, German banks are supervised by two supervisory institutions and have the highest deposit insurance in the world. And last but not least, German banks are numerous, perform poorly, and are part of a historically grown three-pillar system. Hence, German banks can indeed be characterised as unique when compared to other industrialised economies.

The German banking system is characterized by high fragmentation, low profitability and low foreign ownership. Main reason for this is its particular structure that can best be described as forced segmentation. This structure produces local banking markets. The book argues that local bank competition is not as pronounced as national concentration ratios predict and presents a bank pricing study which indicates that local banks, banks located in less densely populated areas and less productive banks tend to charge higher prices for retail bank services than banks that operate nationally. These results as well as lessons drawn from international reforms suggest that the German banking system could benefit from cross-pillar consolidation which promises to export competition from the national to local banking markets. Last but not least, the book analyzes political economy implications of banking reforms and provides suggestions on status quo resolution by identifying ways to facilitate reform implementation in the German banking system.

In response to the credit crunch during the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, many have called for the re-establishment of regional banks in the UK and elsewhere. In this context, Germany’s regional banking system, with its more than 1,400 small and regional savings banks and cooperative banks, is viewed as a role model in the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, in line with the ‘death of distance’ debate, the universal application of ICT-based scoring and rating systems potentially obviates the necessity for proximity to reduce information asymmetries between banks and SMEs, calling into question the key advantage of regional banks. Utilising novel ethnographic findings from full-time participant observation and interviews, this book presents intimate insights into regional savings banks and compares their SME lending practices with large, nationwide-operating commercial banks in Germany. The ethnographic insights are contextualised by concise description of the three-pillar German banking system, covering bank regulation, structural and geographical developments, and enterprise finance. Furthermore, the book advances an original theoretical approach that combines classical banking theories with insights from social studies of finance on the (ontological) foundation of new realism. Ethnographic findings reveal varying distances of credit granting depending on the rating results, i.e. large banks allocate considerable credit-granting authority to local staff and therefore challenge the proximity advantages of regional banks. Nevertheless, by presenting case studies of lending to SMEs, the book demonstrates the ability of regional banks to capitalise on proximity when screening and monitoring financially distressed SMEs and explains why the suggestion that ICT can substitute for proximity in SME lending has to be rejected.

This paper evaluates the risks and vulnerabilities of the German financial system and reviews both the German regulatory and supervisory framework and implementation of the common European framework insofar as it is relevant for Germany. The country is home to two global systemically important financial institutions, Deutsche Bank AG and Allianz SE. The system is also very heterogeneous, with a range of business models and a large number of smaller banks and insurers. The regulatory landscape has changed profoundly with strengthened solvency and liquidity regulations for banks (the EU Capital Requirements Regulation and Directive IV), and the introduction of macroprudential tools.