Crédit Agricole Group (kʁedi aɡʁikɔl), sometimes called La banque verte (The green bank) due to its historical ties to farming, is a French international banking group and the world's largest cooperative financial institution. It is France's second largest bank, after BNP Paribas, as well as the third largest in Europe and tenth largest in the world. It consists of a network of Crédit Agricole local banks, the 39 Crédit Agricole regional banks, and a central institute, the Crédit Agricole S.A.. It is listed through Crédit Agricole S.A., an intermediate holding company, on Euronext Paris' first market and is part of the CAC 40 stock market index. Local banks of the group owned the regional banks, in turn the regional banks majority owned the S.A. via a holding company, in turn the S.A. owned part of the subsidiaries of the group, such as LCL, the Italian network and the CIB unit. It is considered a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board.
It was the title sponsor of the Crédit Agricole professional road cycling team from 1998 to 2008.
In the second half of the 19th century, French farmers struggled to obtain long-term, flexible, reasonably-priced credit. There were several attempts to set up farming banks, including Crédit Foncier de France in 1861, but none was successful.
Crédit Agricole can trace its history back to the end of the 19th century, and specifically to the Act of 1884 establishing the freedom of professional association, which authorised, among other things, the creation of farm unions and the foundation of local mutual banks. Société de Crédit Agricole was created on 23 February 1885 at Salins-les-Bains in the district of Poligny in the Jura region. It was the first of its kind in France.
Drawing on this experience and in an effort to promote lending to small family farms, the Act of 5 November 1894, which had the support of the Minister for Agriculture Jules Méline, paved the way for the creation of Crédit Agricole's local banks.