The supervisory board of PKO BP sent back the strategy prepared by Jerzy Pruski, the bank’s CEO. In fact, it ordered to write it again. The document had 30 slides. Remarks were 12 pages long and they often repeated that the theses were too general.
“In fact, this is just a slightly corrected strategy of the former
management”, a person from the bank’s management revealed.
The owner, i.e.
the state, and the supervisory board expected completely different things. They
want to found a national Polish financial institution.
“Reminds you of
Law&Justice party? Yes. PKO BP is an important element of the economy and it
would be good if decisions were made in Warsaw and not abroad”, “PB” source
added.
Further privatization will be conducted but the shareholder’s
structure will remain scattered.
The national character of the
bank will be reflected by its name: Bank Polski. The colors in the bank’s logo
will be changed from navy blue into white and red. In addition, the bank should
play an important social role.
“There are lots of people in Poland who are
excluded from the economy. They don’t have a bank account, access to bank
services. These are elderly or disabled people. PKO BP must be sensitive, it has
a role to play which commercial institutions will never undertake”, “PB” source
added.
Nevertheless, the bank is supposed to improve results, mainly thanks
to Inteligo, its online branch. It is also supposed to expand abroad, similarly
to mBank which has its outlets in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This business
model may suggest that Slawomir Lachowski, the ex-CEO of BRE Bank prepared it.
Yesterday, he was unavailable for comment.
A 51.49 percent stake of PKO BP
is owned by the Polish stake. At the end of the first quarter of this year, it
had PLN 113.8bn (EUR 35.4 bn) of assets, PLN 81.2bn of credits and PLN 90.7bn of
deposits. It has 5,569,000 accounts, 1,228 outlets and employs 30,414 people.
(PLN 1 = EUR 0.311)