The Meaning of Being Mutual

Financial cooperatives, especially in the banking and insurance sector, represent a significant market share in Europe. These companies were created, to provide solutions providing trust and solidarity to the people impacted by the Industrial Revolution. They survived the 20th century's chaotic developments. They played a major role in the constitution of the middle class during the post war boom, they kept committed to the wide spreading of progress. Their challenges are, at the beginning of the 21st century, to know how to keep their specificities in a world dominated by the race to size. Moreover they have to keep steadily acting for humanism to resist the dangers being reduced to a different way of conducting the business or to copy the profit driven operators.