On Wednesday, Societe Generale SA announced that during the fourth quarter of this year, it saw the net profit quadrupling as compared to the previous year mainly driven by its continued recovery from the economic downturn and that has been possible because of the retail banking side. Even its corporate investment side has seen a rebound and the bad loans are going down.

The French bank is the second biggest lender after BNP Paribas SA. SocGen has also confirmed that it has managed to achieve the target set by it and saw its net income at around EUR6 billion in 2012.

Growth there is part of their strategic plan as it is gearing up to meet the new banking rules set up.

For the period ending December 31, net profit went up to EUR874 million from EUR221 million. Even this was ahead of the analyst targets.

Revenues, on the other hand, rose up by 34 per cent to be at EUR6.85 billion from EUR5.13 billion. At that time, it was the corporate banking side which acted as boosters. It has also made provisions for bad loans this time.