Commercial or ideological? Two centuries of success and failure in Dutch banking.

This article covers the history of three types of banks in the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th century: savings banks, cooperative banks and commercial banks. It tries to explain the success and failure of these banks by exploring their origins. To what extent can their historical roots clarify the differences in the structure and strategies of these diverse types of banks? It describes what happened to the numerous small local banks and especially compares the success of the cooperative banks with the fate of the saving banks that completely vanished. Why was the strategy of these cooperative banks more successful than that of the saving banks and ultimately also of the commercial banks? For this the article focuses on the first half of the 20th century when both banks followed a different road. Finally it analyses the factors that were decisive in the success and failure of the three types of banks that constituted the three-pillar system: why did cooperative banks last, while saving banks vanished and commercial banks, that were at first so successful, failed in the Netherlands? To this end the articles studies the different strategies these banks developed, the scope on which they operated and their governance structure.