In Aubervilliers, a suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis separated from the northern districts of Paris by the ring road, there are sensitive areas hit by poverty, unemployment, trafficking and violence; quieter islets, where former Parisians bought a house with a patio; but also the recently installed Condorcet campus – a research center in human and social sciences -; or the brand new headquarters of Veolia, the water and waste management giant. It is in this municipality that BNP Paribas decided to carry out a “pilot” project by distributing its clients differently within its bank branches, according to the socio-professional profile of each. A separation between clients in difficulty and promising clients, hitherto unheard of in consumer banking networks. “There is a legal risk of stigmatizing part of the clientele, this is not the model of society that we are defending”, some union representatives within the bank are alarmed.
The brand has two points of sale in Aubervilliers, located on avenue de la République, about one kilometer apart. One is near the ring road, at the Quatre-Chemins crossroads, classified in 2019 as a “republican reconquest district” (QRR). A few tens of meters away, on the outskirts of Place Auguste-Baron, are now gathered the consumers and crack dealers that the Ministry of the Interior and the Paris Police Prefecture moved last September, to evacuate the gardens of Eole, in the 18e district of Paris. At the other end of Avenue de la République, next to Aubervilliers town hall, BNP Paribas has a second branch, in a quieter and more commercial environment.
“There is a legal risk of stigmatizing part of the clientele, this is not the model of society that we are defending”, union representatives within the bank
Until now, these two agencies mixed both clients “Not very autonomous, needing support in managing their accounts, carrying out their day-to-day operations and in fact frequenting their agency very regularly”, “Professional clients”, and others “Relatively autonomous”, as the bank explains in an internal document given to trade unions. BNP Paribas sees however in Aubervilliers “A rapidly developing market” and “A growing number of potential prospects”. The bank highlights the sharp increase in the working population in the municipality between 2017 and 2020: + 11.7%, including + 15.8% of PCS + (against + 1.8% in Ile-de- France). A very contrasted dynamic depending on the neighborhood, mainly benefiting the town hall sector, where the working population grew by more than 15% and jobs by more than 17%, when the Quatre-Chemins saw the number of jobs decline by more than 17%.
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