A community bank may be able to offer the range of retail services that low or middle-income households and small and micro enterprises require even if operating on a scale well below € billion – and do it professionally and efficiently, and with sensitivity to local conditions.
Though we don’t use the term, already in Ireland we have a large involvement in community banking with an astonishingly deep credit union sector (it has greater penetration measured by the ratio of accounts to population than in any other country apart from tiny islands in the West Indies).