French bank runs up loss
Cetelem Polska, a part of the French Cetelem group which is linked to BNP Paribas and specialising in domestic credits has reported aloss of PLN20.5m last year.
Despite these losses the French company is to continue to back its Polish subsidiary. It believes that it will see profits at the earliest within the next year and claims the losses are due to investments in new technology.
Last year Cetelem Polska tried to buy a majority stake in Wrocław based Lukas although it lost out to its French rival Credit Agricole.
Cetelem will now try to win over private clients on its own and has started to work with a number of large hypermarkets and plans on issuing 80,000 credit cards with them.