CCF bank cut by a third of its workforce (AFP / Jack GUEZ)
After Auchan and Michelin at the beginning of November, it is the turn on Wednesday of Crédit commercial de France (CCF), former HSBC retail banking network in France, to announce a plan for major job cuts in France.
The bank plans to reduce its workforce by a third over the next two years, with 1,400 fewer employees, and to close more than 80 branches.
At the end of the employment protection plan (PSE) announced Wednesday during a CSE, there should remain 2,500 employees and 151 agencies, compared to respectively 3,900 employees and 235 agencies today.
This “profound transformation project” aims to “rediscover the path to sustainable growth”, explains the bank, controlled by the American fund Cerberus, in a press release.
The bank estimates that this plan, a draft of which was presented to employees at the beginning of October, should return to balance in 2026 and generate profits from 2027.
Even if the orders of magnitude in terms of job and agency cuts were known, “there is still astonishment on the part of employees” in the face of the “scale” of the plan, Bruno Ronsin explains to AFP, elected CFTC.
“Incomprehensible (…) Nothing justifies a plan of such magnitude!”, reacted the FO union in a press release, deploring in passing the “staggering and above all difficult to justify” figures.
– On a human scale –
The unions are now entering a phase of negotiations which will continue until the middle of next year.
For the remaining employees, there is also a “very difficult transition phase with management which wishes to maintain the current GNP (net banking product, equivalent of turnover for the sector) until 2027”, underlines Mr. Ronsin.
“A constructive social dialogue is underway,” assures management, for its part, which plans three successive waves of departures: one in 2025 and two in 2026.
The CCF was resurrected at the beginning of January by the company My Money Group (MMG), controlled by the American fund Cerberus, after the purchase of the retail banking network in France of the British banking giant HSBC and its portfolio of 800,000 customers, which was spread over almost three years.
Cerberus is not its first attempt in the banking sector, since it paid 3.2 billion euros in 2007 to acquire the former Austrian union bank Bawag.
It also purchased from the British Treasury in 2015 a portfolio of mortgage loans from the defunct Northern Rock bank, nationalized in 2008.
There followed a standoff between the fund and a group of borrowers, who criticized their creditor for not applying the new market rates, lower than those they had signed.
The new management of the CCF, embodied by the general director Niccolò Ubertalli, was given one year to begin a new phase of the group's strategy.
“After a stabilization phase, field meetings and detailed analyses, the Group has clarified its strategic vision,” the bank said on Wednesday.
Its ambition is to create a “heritage French bank on a human scale” aimed at a clientele of professionals, liberals and independents, such as lawyers or doctors, with assets of 50,000 euros or more.
Despite technical setbacks at the start of the year, the CCF limited the damage in terms of customers, citing a stock reduced by around 5% since January.
