By Patricia Kowsmann and Margot Patrick
European banks are using the pandemic to make changes investors have wanted for years: slash jobs, shut branches and force customers online.
Germany's second-largest lender, Commerzbank AG, said Thursday that it would cut a third of its domestic staff and almost half of its bricks-and-mortar presence after pressure from U.S. shareholder Cerberus Capital Management. Bank mergers under way in Italy and Spain are expected to close thousands of overlapping branches. Business consulting firm Kearney predicts one-quarter of Europe's 165,000 bank branches will be gone in three years.
Banks are one of Europe's economic weak links, and they have been slow to change. Compared with U.S. peers, European banks struggle to make enough money to support lending growth. They came into the Covid-19 crisis still digesting a mountain of bad loans from the sovereign-debt crisis that started more than a decade ago.