The Caisse d’Epargne

The Caisse d’Epargne is a French semi-cooperative banking group, founded in 1818, with around 4700 branches in the country. The group is active in retail and private banking, as well as holding a significant stake in the publicly traded investment bank Natixis. The Caisse d’Epargne has just come out with an innovation that many financial professionals find strange to say the least. The French bank has been closing many branches and in order to compensate for all these closures and because many people still want to face someone to talk to when it comes to their financial issues, the bank wishes to hire financial advisers. In fact, it turns out that it is difficult for banks to close branches while maintaining local contact with its customers. At the start, this concept will only be tried in three French locations, but the idea is clearly to spread it to the whole country at a later stage. So what is this strange innovation? Well, La Caisse d’Epargne is going to hire financial advisers but will not pay them! Well, they will be paid but only on a commission basis. In other words, these advisers will only be remunerated when they manage to sell a Caisse d’Epargne financial product to a client. Logically, most commissioned products will be the most recommended. A shortcoming currently existing for all non-independent financial advisers and the main reason why we have always thought that performance-based financial advisers were the best ones for clients. You could find our ranking by clicking here.