A working paper published by the European Central Bank (ECB) attempts to identify the business models used by commercial banks operating in the eurozone.

In Business models of the banks in the euro area, Matteo Farne and Angelos Vouldis use a proprietary dataset collected by the ECB’s supervisory arm.

The authors use a clustering methodology to identify four main business models. These are “securities holding banks”, “wholesale funded banks”, “traditional commercial banks” and “complex