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.

[8] The religious backgrounds found their way to their organisational structures, as well; Boerenleenbank was highly centralised, while Raiffeisen-Bank promoted local autonomy.

Three major developments caused a further tightening of the bonds between the two: In 1972, the two organisations merged to form Coöperatieve Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank, or Rabobank for short.

Rabobank became a significant[clarification needed] lender to the rural sector in New Zealand with this purchase and used this as a base to expand its lending business further.

A second online savings banks was launched in 2005 in Ireland under the name of RaboDirect, and then as RaboPlus in New Zealand and two years later in Australia.

In 2010, Rabobank decided to use the same brand name in Australia and New Zealand for the savings bank and replaced RaboPlus with RaboDirect in these countries.

Rabobank will continue to do business in North America related to Food and Agriculture based-lending under its subsidiary Rabo AgriFinance.

[citation needed] A 2013 scandal resulted in a $1 billion fine for unscrupulous trading practices, which included the manipulation of LIBOR currency rates worldwide.

This leads to a rather unusual phenomenon within international business: the mother companies and the much larger daughter are essentially forced to coexist in order to function properly.

They have an added task compared to a traditional board i.e., they are expected to look out for the specific interests of the members (local banks and their certificate holders).

Rabobank is traditionally a farmers' bank and it still holds an 85% to 90% market share in the agrarian sector in the Netherlands.

[citation needed] In the Netherlands, Rabobank is the third-largest retail bank by market share, and second largest by number of current accounts at 30%.

RaboDirect operates in Belgium, the Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Germany offering savings accounts, term deposits and managed funds.

[21] RaboDirect was the sponsor of rugby union's Pro12 from the 2011-12 season until 2013–14, it featured teams from Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales.

The Polish business including BGZ Optima was subsequently sold to French bank BNP Paribas in December 2013 for around $1.4 billion.

[27] Rabobank has naming rights to several venues and organizations, including: The major investment banks in London report daily the interest on short-term loans that they charge each other.

When it emerged that some banks had deliberately stated this interest rate too high or too low since 1991, the Libor scandal was born.

Because the Libor interest rate is also used in the United States to calculate the price of derivatives, American regulators also took action.

Rabobank agreed to pay settlement amounts to OM, FCA, CFTC and DOJ totalling approximately EUR 774 million.

[31][32][33][34] In February 2018, Rabobank reached a settlement with the United States Department of Justice for 298 million euros.

The bank did not have its internal controls in order, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money being laundered through the American Rabobank subsidiary RNA in California.

[37] The report highlights the importance of EU regulation of the financial sector to align financing with global 1.5 °C and biodiversity targets.

Rabobank has received criticism because the bank was involved in financing hundreds of farmers who committed illegal deforestation in Brazil.

[41][42][43] Rabobank has been placed on the list of major polluters of the Dutch NGO Milieudefensie because the bank would have invested more than 1.4 billion euros in companies involved in deforestation in the period from 2015 to 2022.

Rabobank continues to finance global meat and dairy corporations and thus drives climate change and deforestation.

[48][49] The House of Representatives asked the cabinet in a motion to investigate whether banks such as Rabobank could be forced to contribute to solving the nitrogen crisis.

[50] The bank refused loans to projects with alternative agricultural methods, which led to forced expansion of Dutch livestock farms.

[52] Rabobank still invests in expensive techniques, not in solving but in technically mitigating the negative consequences of mass livestock farming and economies of scale.

[53] Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace issued an ultimatum to Rabobank in 2023 to stop financing industrial agriculture, to which the bank did not respond.