César González-Bueno has gifted himself a Ducati to start his retirement. The former CEO of Banco Sabadell, 66 years old, is off to rev up his new motorcycle while the Catalan bank faces a winding road ahead. Now without its British subsidiary TSB, which has passed into the hands of Banco Santander, the new CEO Marc Armengol, who turns 50, takes the wheel of a smaller Sabadell with the mission of adapting the bank’s services to the new technological reality and the challenges and opportunities posed by the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI). For now, the transition has been formalized with a quarterly result down, profits falling by 29.1%, but without distorting the shareholders’ meeting this Wednesday afternoon in Sabadell before shareholders who are eager because dividends were promised to them.
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The new stage of Sabadell has returned the white flag to the bank’s headquarters. The year and a half of tense skirmish with BBVA over the hostile takeover bid launched by the entity chaired by Carlos Torres has ceased to be an overwhelming concern to become a light topic of conversation. It is almost treated as an anecdote. This Monday, Sabadell’s president Josep Oliu and BBVA’s Carlos Torres coincided in Barcelona at the event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of EL PAÍS. They chatted animatedly and even shared a laugh. Nothing like the tension that existed between them until recently.
Josep Oliu, just turned 77, remains as the bank’s president, strengthened by the morale boost that the outcome of the takeover bid represented. He defends that the entity can continue alone but without closing off any flirtation that might be interesting. Although now is not the time for mergers, “what is done later, we will see,” he acknowledged in a press meeting prior to the shareholders’ meeting.
A window that César González-Bueno, outgoing CEO, was the first to leave open when he said on Tuesday that a merger in the mid-sized banking sector would be logical: “In the very long term I would like more consolidation in Europe and more in Spain, but in Spain excluding the big three,” referring to the fact that any operation must be done excluding Caixabank, Santander, and BBVA so as not to undermine competition.
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Marc Armengol, during a meeting with the media in Barcelona before the shareholders’ meeting held this Wednesday in Sabadell, pointed out that there is no need to think of a great revolution because the bank will continue to be faithful to the essence that characterizes it. He emphasizes that Sabadell wants to continue being “a bank very close to its customers,” which, after the sale of the British subsidiary, TSB, will focus even more on Spain and aspires to be an “even more agile” entity.
The narrative accompanying his debut in the role refers to nurturing the relationship with the customer, but incorporating new digital capabilities and deepening personalization.
