Crédit Agricole-Bpm, the French close the risk with the most coveted prey in Northern Italy

Crédit Agricole, after four years of creeping climb, is trying to close a turbulent phase of Italian banking risk by bringing home its most coveted prey, Banco Bpm. The bank led by Giuseppe Castagna escaped the aims of Unicredit and MPS by always winking at the French, who slowly increased their stake up to 30%.

For the former Banca Popolare di Milano, the announced operation, if it goes through, sounds like a nemesis. To understand why, we need to go back to January 2015, when Matteo Renzi was in government, who imposed by decree on cooperative banks to transform into joint stock companies. And so it was also for Bpm that in 2019, when it merged with Banca Popolare di Verona, Bpm became a spa, a company listed on the stock exchange with the majority of shares distributed on the market potentially scalable by an external entity.

From there began the long ride of the stock on the stock exchange thanks to the contestability achieved and the growth of the budget results under the guidance of the Neapolitan banker trained at the Intesa Sanpaolo school. But now, ironically, Banco Bpm could return to being a non-contestable popular bank, given that Crédit Agricole, which will have 45% of the new group, is in turn controlled by French cooperatives with a share of more than 50%. And precisely for this reason, the market valuation on the Paris Stock Exchange is much lower than that of other contestable banks, only 7 times the balance sheet profits compared to almost ten times that of the Piazza Meda bank. Also by virtue of lower budget profitability.

But this result has a director known to all, the Meloni government. The most rooted bank in the economically developed territory of the country, Lombardy, Veneto ends up in French hands thanks to the fact that only a year and a half ago the Northern League Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, supported by Matteo Salvini, erected a barricade against the Ops launched by Unicredit. In April 2025, Palazzo Chigi wrote a decree based on the Golden Power law, contested by the EU, which clearly went beyond its prerogatives. With the aim of preventing Andrea Orcel from conquering Banco Bpm to become a national champion. The same Orcel who would later go on to conquer Commerzbank.

Now Unicredit is one step away from operational control of the German bank but without having first strengthened itself on the Italian market. «We had said that in the Italian banking risk we are only observers and we had said before the summer that the operation we are discussing today, i.e. a merger between Banco Bpm and Crédit Agricole Italia, was very likely to happen. We see it as an opportunity to accelerate organic growth", said Orcel while presenting Unicredit's results. «We have many opportunities to further accelerate this growth, we will reach 15% market share and we will do it without paying a single euro of premium».