A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise". Cooperatives are democratically controlled by their members, with each member having one vote in electing the board of directors. They differ from collectives in that they are generally built from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. Cooperatives may include:
Crédit Agricole Group, sometimes called La banque verte, is a French international banking group and the world's largest cooperative financial institution. It is the second largest bank in France, after BNP Paribas, as well as the third largest in Europe and tenth largest in the world. It consists of a network of Crédit Agricole local banks, 39 Agricole regional banks and a central institute, the Crédit Agricole S.A.. It is listed through Crédit Agricole S.A., as an intermediate holding company, on Euronext Paris' first market and is part of the CAC 40 stock market index. Local banks of the group owned the regional banks, in turn the regional banks majority owned the S.A. via a holding company, in turn the S.A. owned part of the subsidiaries of the group, such as LCL, the Italian network and the CIB unit. It is considered to be a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board.
Rabobank is a Dutch multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Utrecht, Netherlands. The group comprises 89 local Dutch Rabobanks (2019), a central organisation, and many specialised international offices and subsidiaries. Food and agribusiness constitute the primary international focus of the Rabobank Group. Rabobank is the second-largest bank in the Netherlands in terms of total assets.
Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen was a German mayor and cooperative pioneer. Several credit union systems and cooperative banks have been named after Raiffeisen, who pioneered rural credit unions.
DZ Bank AG is the second largest bank in Germany by asset size and the central institution for around 700 cooperative banks and their around 7,200 branch offices. Within that Bundesverband der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken, which is one of Germany's largest private sector financial service organizations and manages assets of around 1.175 trillion euros, DZ Bank functions both as a central institution and as a corporate and investment bank.
Cooperative banking is retail and commercial banking organized on a cooperative basis. Cooperative banking institutions take deposits and lend money in most parts of the world.
Banque Populaire was a French group of cooperative banks, with origins in the European cooperative movement. In 2009, it merged with Groupe Caisse d'Épargne to form Groupe BPCE.
Groupe Caisse d'épargne was a group of French savings banks that were converted into cooperative banks by legislation enacted in 1999. Its roots went back to the founding in 1818 of the Caisse d'Épargne et de Prévoyance de Paris, initiated by Benjamin Delessert and the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt.
The Deutsche Genossenschafts- und Raiffeisenverband e.V. (DGRV) is the Co-operative federation for German Co-operatives.
The South Korean National Agricultural Cooperative Federation was established in 1961 to enhance the social and economic status of its membership and to promote a balanced development of the national economy. Its role is divided into three areas: marketing and supply, banking and insurance, and extension services.
Groupe BPCE is a major French banking group formed by the 2009 merger of two major retail banking groups, Groupe Caisse d'Épargne and Groupe Banque Populaire. As of 2021, it was France's fourth largest bank, the seventh largest in Europe, and the nineteenth in the world by total assets. It has more than 8,200 branches nationwide under their respective brand names serving nearly 150 million customers. Its wholesale banking subsidiary Natixis, previously a separately listed company, was delisted and came under full ownership of Groupe BPCE in 2021.
The National Association of German Cooperative Banks is the umbrella association for the German Cooperative Financial Group. Its origins go back to 1864 as Allgemeiner Verband der auf Selbsthilfe beruhenden Deutschen Erwerbs- und Wirtschaftsgenossenschaften. As of 2015 it had 1,021 members, which represents all the cooperative banks in Germany, including local cooperative banks, PSD banks, Sparda banks, Church banks and Cooperative financial institutions, managing around 1.200 trillion euros.
The German Cooperative Financial Group is a major cooperative banking network in Germany that includes local banks named Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, the latter in tribute to 19th-century cooperative movement pioneer Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen. The Cooperative Group represents one of the three "pillars" of Germany's banking sector, the other two being, respectively, the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe of public banks, and the commercial banking sector represented by the Association of German Banks.
Crédit Mutuel is a French cooperative banking group, one of the country's top five banks with over 30 million customers. It traces its origins back to the German cooperative movement inspired by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in Alsace–Lorraine under German rule, in the 1880s. Crédit Mutuel was a member of the International Raiffeisen Union (IRU).
Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) is a key entity of the decentralized Raiffeisen Banking Group in Austria, acting both as the latter's domestic central financial entity and as the holding company for all the group's operations outside of Austria. The bank is listed on the Wiener Börse. Its major shareholders are the Raiffeisen Banking Group's eight regional banks (Raiffeisen-Landesbanken), which are bound by a shareholders' agreement and together hold a majority of RBI's equity.
Raiffeisenbank or Raiffeisen Bank refers to cooperative banks in Europe that are rooted in the early credit unions of Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen. The name is found in:
Unico Banking Group was a partnership of eight European co-operative banks founded in 1977 and effectively wound down in 2017.
TakarékBank was a banking and financial services corporation in Hungary and the central institution for more than 60 co-operative banks and their 1,100 branch offices. In 2023, it merged with MKB Bank to form MBH Bank.
