Financial Competitiveness and Resilience Under Tension: A Comparative Analysis Between Banks and Savings and Credit Cooperatives in Colombia (2016–2024) Through Benchmarking and Clustering

Introduction. The literature on financial competitiveness and resilience has favored individual studies of banks or cooperatives, leaving a gap in comparative analysis of both sectors within a common methodological framework. This research addressed this gap by directly comparing the three leading banks and three leading savings and credit cooperatives in Colombia, selected for their asset and income levels, over the period 2016–2024.
Objectives. The central purpose was to analyze how competitiveness and resilience manifested in entities with different capital structures and scales of operation, establishing points of convergence and divergence in their financial dynamics.
Method. A quantitative, longitudinal, and comparative approach was applied using benchmarking and cluster analysis. Time series were constructed with key indicators of solvency, leverage, indebtedness, autonomy, profitability (ROA and ROE), and economic margin, calculated from official reports of supervisory and regulatory entities. The analysis included descriptive statistics, centroid validation, and ANOVA tests, enabling characterization of persistent patterns and periods of critical volatility.
Results: Banks concentrated economies of scale, although with high exposure to leverage risks and low levels of autonomy. Cooperatives, in contrast, showed greater capital strength and relative efficiency in asset use, standing out in resilience to financial shocks. The comparative benchmark of the six leading institutions revealed that competitiveness depended not only on size but also on the capacity to maintain balanced capital structures.
Discussion: These findings broadened understanding of the Colombian financial system as a hybrid ecosystem in which banks and cooperatives play complementary roles in intermediation. The evidence showed that resilience is not the exclusive domain of large institutions, but can be strengthened through robust capital strategies and prudent risk management.
Conclusions: The study provided original evidence on the direct comparison between banks and cooperatives through benchmarking and clustering, demonstrating that the tension between competitiveness and resilience depends on structural factors rather than size. As a practical contribution, the results offer inputs for financial regulation aimed at balancing competition and stability, as well as for the strategic management of entities seeking to strengthen their performance in volatile environments.

financial competitiveness; resilience; benchmarking; clustering; banks; savings and credit cooperatives; Colombia.

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