When you choose to work with the Crédit Agricole Group, you join a major international Group, with a wide range of businesses and brands, and more than 145,000 employees worldwide.

Our strength, values and commitments are rooted in our history…

It all began at the end of the 19th century with the Crédit Agricole local banks. Created to make up for the absence of loans suited for farmers, these banks were based on cooperative principles with farm syndicates.

Our commitment was strengthened during the first and second world wars, when we mobilised popular savings and contributed to the post-war reconstruction effort and the mechanisation of farming.

The regional banks further broadened their scope both geographically, by spreading to rural areas, and financially, with loans to small- and medium-sized businesses. Specialised subsidiaries were created: Union d’Études et d’Investissements was created for equity investments, Segespar for asset management and Unicrédit for loans to agri-food businesses.

We also became the bank for housing and households, thus marking our close relationship with our customers.

In 1979, our financial strength was recognised and we were able to expand internationally with our first operations outside France. The Banker magazine ranked Crédit Agricole among the world’s leading banks.

Caisse Nationale du Crédit Agricole, created in 1926 in particular to ensure the continuity of names between the three levels (local, regional and national), was thus replaced by Crédit Agricole S.A., the name of the company that was listed on the stock exchange in 2001

With the acquisition of Banque Indosuez in 1996, Sofinco in 1999 and Finaref in 2003, we have diversified our activities into corporate and investment banking as well as consumer credit. In 2003, the merger with Crédit Lyonnais resulted in the creation of Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank (CA CIB) in 2006. Crédit Lyonnais, re-focused on retail banking, has been developing the LCL brand since 2005. Our asset management subsidiary, Amundi, created in 2010 and ranked leading European player and ninth worldwide in 2013, has been listed on the stock exchange since 2015.

Our development has gone hand-in-hand with responsible commitments such as the signing of the diversity charter and the creation in 2008 of the Grameen Crédit Agricole Microfinance Foundation.

We are committed to being the trusted partner of all our clients. We want to be useful and close to our customers, by drawing on the commitment of all our employees:

• Thanks to our solidity and the diversity of our expertise, we are able to offer our customers ongoing support on a daily basis and for their life projects. We help them protect themselves against unexpected events and plan for the long term.
• We seek and protect their interests in all our actions. We advise them with transparency, loyalty and pedagogy.
• Human responsibility lies at the heart of our model. Our clients benefit from the best technological practices and we guarantee them access to competent, available teams that can manage all aspects of the customer relationship.

We draw on the governance of elected representatives who represent our clients, and we are proud of our cooperative and mutual identity:

• We help local communities by supporting the economy, entrepreneurship and innovation in France and abroad.
• We actively address social and environmental issues by supporting progress and change.
• We serve everyone, from the most modest to the wealthiest households, from local professionals to large international corporations.

Our group is the number one provider of financing to the French economy and one of the leading banking players in Europe:

• We have leading positions in Europe: leader in retail banking, the leading asset manager, bancassurer and third-largest project financing institution.
• We draw on our universal retail banking model to support our customers with their projects in France and worldwide: payment instruments, asset management, lease financing and factoring, corporate and investment banking, insurance, etc.
• More than one out of two companies in France bank with us and we operate in 46 countries with 53 million customers.