Powszechny Bank Kredytowy (), also known as Bank PBK, was a Polish bank based in Warsaw. It was established in 1988-1989 by spinoff from the National Bank of Poland, and was eventually merged in 2001 with Bank BPH to form Bank BPH-PBK.
History Bank PBK was one of nine regional banks spun off from the National Bank of Poland, the culmination of a sequence of reforms during the 1980s that brought an end to the country's single-tier banking system.
It was legally established in April 1988 and started operations on . Its first president was . Its name evoked a former affiliate of Vienna's Länderbank, also named Powszechny Bank Kredytowy (), which had been establish in 1910 in Austrian Galicia and relocated from there to Warsaw in 1926.
On , Bank PBK was transformed into a joint-stock company, fully owned by the Polish State Treasury. By the mid-1990s it was the seven-largest Polish bank overall behind PKO Bank Polski, Bank Pekao, Bank Handlowy, Bank BGŻ, Bank PBG, and Bank Śląski. In 1995, Vienna-based Creditanstalt acquired 13 percent of Bank PBK's shares in a partial privatization process. Also in 1995, Bank PBK took a 54.4-percent stake in Górnośląski Bank Gospodarczy (Bank GBG). In 1997, it absorbed operations from the troubled , and in 1998, from .
The ownership stake of Creditanstalt, by then controlled by Bank Austria, in Bank PBK increased to reach 57 percent in 2000. In June of that year, Bank Austria-Creditanstalt announced that it would merge its own Polish subsidiary into Bank PBK. In 2001, Bank Austria had itself come under the control of Munich-based HypoVereinsbank (HVB) which decided to merge Bank PBK with its own Polish subsidiary Bank BPH to form Bank Przemysłowo-Handlowy PBK. The merged entity, also known as Bank BPH-PBK, was the third-largest bank in Poland by assets at the time.
See also List of banks in Poland
References