The group comprises 89 local Dutch Rabobanks , a central organisation Rabobank Nederland , and many specialised international offices and subsidiaries. Food and agribusiness constitute the primary international focus of the Rabobank Group. In terms of Tier 1 capital , the organisation is among the 50 largest financial institutions in the world. Rabobank has been designated as a Significant Institution since the entry into force of European Banking Supervision in late , and as a consequence is directly supervised by the European Central Bank.
Rooted in agriculture , Rabobank is set up as a federation of local credit unions that offer services to the local markets. The bank was rooted in the ideas of Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen , the founder of the cooperative movement of credit unions, who in created the first farmers' bank in Germany.
Being a countryside mayor he was confronted with the abject poverty of the farmers and their families. He tried to alleviate this need through charitable aid , but realised that self-reliance had more potential in the long run, and thus converted his charitable foundation into a farmers' bank in In doing so he created the Darlehnskassen-Verein , which collected the savings of countryside dwellers and provided enterprising farmers with loans. This model found a lot of interest in the Netherlands at the end of the 19th century.
One of the first of Raiffeisen's followers was Father Gerlacus van den Elsen, who stood at the basis of a number of local farmers' banks in the south of the Netherlands. The model caught on being championed by the clergy and the countryside elites.
The mission of the farmers' lending banks was an idealistic one, but they always operated using strict business principles. Controversially, a founding principle of Rabobank's cooperative style was to cooperate in the interest of "warding off the Shylock ".
