Former Minister of Finance with UCD, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Spain and Director General of Supervision of Regulation and Financial Stability. These three profiles are the profiles of the last three presidents of the Spanish Banking Association (AEB), the employers’ association that includes Spanish and foreign banks operating in the country as Santander, BBVA, Sabadell and Bankinter as its most important members. Since the early 1990s, the lobbying role of this organization has forced it to move closer to more political profiles or those with ties to oversight bodies. Now, more than 30 years later, the association is returning to its beginnings, once again placing its bet on the director of one of the largest banking groups. And, for the first time, a woman will be at the head of the organization.
Alejandra Kindelan was elected to replace Jose Maria Roldan, who is stepping down this Tuesday for a two-year term and eight years later as the face of the association. For the first time, it will be the president who heads the Employers’ Association, nominated by Banco Santander, the most powerful member of the AEB. The association meeting, to be held this Tuesday, will confirm Kindelan’s appointment, which was announced in February, in the wake of Roldan’s decision, to no longer stand for a new term planned for one year. Sector executives have since the beginning of the year announced their intention to be appointed to a female position, the first in AEB history.
The new president has a profile that is closely linked to Banco Santander. The 50-year-old Venezuelan director first came to the band in the now-disbanded Central Hispano, which was later swallowed by Santander. Nearly three decades have passed since he was mainly in charge of the group’s economic research center, in addition to being the director of the Bank of Argentina and its subsidiary, Santander Consumer Finance. Now she will become the visible face of a sector that lacks feminine leadership in addition to Santander’s president, Anna Botini, and the banker’s CEO, Maria Dolores Dancaus. And this despite the fact that it is currently estimated that more than half of the workforce in the sector is women, a percentage that is declining as the banks climb the power pyramid. Of the 26 members who make up the AEB leadership, only four are women.
But in addition to being the first director to break the association’s glass ceiling – he is the fifth person to hold the position, Kindelan is also breaking the inertia of his three predecessors who were from the public sector. Roldan himself, from whom he stepped down this Tuesday, became president of the AEB in 2014, a few months after resigning as director general of regulation and financial stability at the Bank of Spain. It was a controversial appointment as he came to confront the then Minister of Economy, Luis de Guindos, with the Chief Financial Officers over his loyalty, which was so closely linked to the supervisor in the midst of his financial situation. Crisis on the bench after public survival. Thirteen years after taking office, he dropped the supervisor’s suit to become a lobbyist for the Bank of Spain, a revolving door from which Guindos came to publicize his “deep discomfort” over the non-aesthetic appointment.
Guindos proposed regulatory reform to prevent this transfer from the body to the private sector, which at the time took only six months of incompatibility, a period that Roldan played before taking on a new role, and the Bank of Spain revised it. Its incompatibility system. In the context of the bank’s survival, which took place just a year and a half before the arrival of the AEB president in Roldan, the executive backed Simon O., the European Commission’s economic director in those years. Connor, who showed he was “very supportive” of restricting these revolving doors. Eventually, the appointment went into effect, and from April 2014, Rolandan served as the Bank’s spokesperson for sectoral issues affecting his interests at both the Spanish and European levels.
Roland is no exception. His predecessor was Miguel Martin Fernandez, who since the late 1970s has held positions such as Treasurer General or, in short, President of the Official Credit Institution (ICO). He then arrived at the Bank of Spain, where he became Deputy Governor at the time when Angel Rojo was head of banking supervision. He held the position from 1992 to 2000 and returned a year later to the agency for internal oversight. Martin’s name even figured out among the half-dozen alternatives considered as a replacement for Rojo, although Jaime Caruana was eventually chosen.
Among the issues that the tandem of Rojo and Martin had to deal with was the Banesto crisis, which eventually intervened and was awarded to Banco Santander. Years later, Rojo became the director of Banco Santander, and Martin was promoted to president of the AEB, an appointment approved by an organization then headed by Emilio Botini, BBVA, and Banco Popular. The former deputy governor of the Bank of Spain remained the visible face of the banking bosses from 2006 to 2014, coinciding with the first years of the financial crisis that devastated the sector.
Martin replaced Jose Luis Leal, who held the position of Assistant to the BBV President. However, Leal, like his two successors, also had a place in the public sector. For his part, the economist was a member of the UCD during the transition period and held positions in the party, such as director general of economic policy or, for several months, finance minister, in one of the remodels carried out by Adolfo Suarez de. Your executive. To date he has been the President of the AEB, having the most years in the post he took in 1990 and from which he left in 2006, at the gates of the financial crisis.
With Kindelan, the AEB goes back to its inception by choosing a profile in the supervisor or government without a past. Its first president was Raphael Termes, who in 1977, in the midst of a transition period, established an employers’ organization that included the country’s private banks. Termes, an economic profile closely linked to Opus Dei, was the CEO of Banco Popular, one of the leading private banks in those years, and remained at the helm of the Employers’ Association until 1990.
Kindelan holds the position of representative of a much thinner sector than what Roldan inherited when he became president of the AEB. The interim crisis and the tendency to reduce the branch network and staff to a minimum left the banking sector at about half of the level it had in 2006. Now the next president will have to deal with one of the problems. What Roldan has had over the last decade: the loss of the sector’s reputation. One of Roldan’s recent works at the helm of the AEB was the creation of a Sector Dialogue to improve the Bank’s focus on the most vulnerable groups, especially the elderly.
Kindelan also inherits an eternal debate over the future of bank bosses. There are currently three in Spain, AEB, CECA (formerly Savings Banks) and Unacc, which includes rural banks. After the savings banks disappeared and virtually all of them became banks, the debate over the merger with AEB, Santander, BBVA, Sabadell and Bankinter, and CECA, which is now virtually monopolized by CaixaBank Emerged in the sector. Which has always been discussed, but never fulfilled. Thus, the new president of the AEB will have to co-exist with CECA and work with its president, the historic banker Isidro Faines.
Source: El Diario
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