Tag: La Poste

Jean-Paul Bailly, chairman of France’s state-owned postal operator La Poste, said he aims to have 9 percent of the country’s home mortgage market within 10 years, following government deregulation of the sector.

‘We have 4 percent of this market today,’ Bailly said.

‘We are aiming, by 10 years from now, for a share that corresponds with our share of the retail banking market in France, which is to say about 9 percent,’ he added.

French Parliament have approved laws that allow La Poste to offer home mortgages and other products to clients who do not already have current accounts.

In France, the transfer of La Poste’s financial services activities to a newly created postal bank next July is a major victory for the postal operator and a setback for France’s banking lobby. However, France is not alone in seeing postal organisations moving into retail banking.

China’s government is expected to pursue reforms, perhaps as early as this year, that will result in the conversion of the Postal Savings and Remittance Bureau into a postal savings bank. Meanwhile, Swiss Post has lobbied unsuccessfully for permission to obtain a banking licence to expand the range of products and services it can directly offer through its PostFinance financial services division, especially products such as consumer credit and housing loans.

While some postal operators are offloading their postal banks, others are returning to the sector by setting up financial services or banking subsidiaries.