The Five-Bank Market After Strum
The Strum Committee reforms were supposed to break the Israeli banking duopoly. A decade on, the market is more contested at the edges but the core structure is intact.
The starting point
The Strum Committee, established by the Israeli government in 2015 and reporting in 2016, was the most ambitious attempt in a generation to reshape Israeli retail banking competition. It targeted the dominance of Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi over consumer credit, mandated divestment of credit-card subsidiaries (Isracard from Hapoalim; CAL from Discount; Max from Leumi), and opened the field to non-bank lenders.
What changed
The credit-card subsidiaries were divested. Non-bank consumer lenders — Pagaya-adjacent platforms, traditional finance companies, and the digital-bank entrant ONE ZERO — gained market share, particularly in unsecured consumer credit. The Bank of Israel's open-banking initiatives enabled price comparison and account portability in ways previously unavailable.
What did not change
The five-bank market structure (Hapoalim, Leumi, Mizrahi-Tefahot, Discount, FIBI) is intact. Total deposit share remains highly concentrated; mortgage origination and SME lending remain bank-dominated; the supervisory and capital framework still favours incumbents. ONE ZERO's market entry has been measured rather than disruptive.
The 2026 picture
The competitive frontier is now at the product layer (consumer credit, payments, FX), not the institutional layer. Calls for full digital-bank licensing reform recur in the Knesset Finance Committee; the Bank of Israel's posture remains conservative. The next decade of Israeli retail banking change is more likely to come from the Bank of Israel's open-banking architecture and from the institutional capital flowing into non-bank credit than from any further structural reform.