Spain: association FETS initiates ethical banking in Catalonia

With the support of the Italian ?Banca Popolare Etica?, the Association FETS is promoting the creation of the first ethical bank in Catalonia, which is initially planning to open an office at the very heart of Barcelona. At the beginning, this ethical bank will act as a delegation of the Italian ethical bank and will only become an independent organisation when it achieves the necessary financial size. FETS is currently looking for promoters among its 50 partners and also in other fields in order to create an association that assumes the project.

For the Italian ethical bank, this would be its second experience in Spain as on October 2005 it started to collaborate with the Fundación Fiare (The Basque Country) along the same terms. Fiare gathers 50 Basque social organisations and is currently active in the towns of Bilbao, San Sebastián and Pamplona where it is promoting loans with a sense of corporate responsibility. When both the projects in the Basque Country and Catalonia are self-sufficient it is planned to create a credit union that will work according to the principles of ethical banking. This is hardly expected to happen before 2010.

FETS is also planning to launch a Spanish-wide Observatory on ethical financing that would be devised as a tool for knowledge management and to monitor the sector, its actors and products. Another of its aims would be to expand ethical financing to other segments beyond the third system and social economy. More information on: www.fets.org