PROFITABILITY OF THE ITALIAN CREDIT COOPERATIVE BANKS

Our research explores the Italian banking sector. It's focus on the world of Credit Cooperative Banks (BCCs). The reality of the mutual banks in Italy is very important: they are 364 BCCs in 2015 for a total of over 4,400 branches throughout the Italian territory. The employees are over 37,000. This study can help us understand the context and the main business in which banks operate. Data were extracted from Bankscope, which is a database containing comprehensive information on financial companies (banks and insurance companies) in Italy. Our sample represents 264 Italian BCCs. In our research we want to show that the BCCs are relevant in the Italian banking sector and then the sample data are particularly significant also as an indicator of the Italian banking sector, then we have appropriately calculated the two indicators: the Profit Margin and ROE, and we put them in comparison to see how they have changed over the years. At the end we calculate the Pearson correlation ratio between Profit/Loss and Net Banking Income of each year. Thanks to this relationship, we are able to analyze the possible correlation of Net Banking Income on the profitability of the banks, in order to assess the effects of a policy that is carried out by governance to face the difficulties that the banking world is going through.