buisnesess
There Will Be Room for Banks
Cezary Stypułkowski in an interview with Łukasz Wilkowicz
Has any journalist had the chance to ask you why you joined Pekao?
Many people have asked me about this.
And what is your response?
There are two circumstances. One, I have always believed that Pekao SA is the best banking platform in Poland. It’s had very good retail customers, affluent customers with foreign currency accounts. It covered all of Poland with its branch network, and it was recognisable. Once it on-boarded three regional banks and then swallowed the best part of BPH, it was well-balanced, with a strong corporate and retail pillar. I have always been interested in this bank. In 1990, the then CEO of Pekao Marian Kanton suggested that I become his deputy. He is dead now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I even wrote Pekao’s investment banking development concept for him at the time.
You then became CEO of Bank Handlowy. I thought, if there was a personal motivation, it was a way of trying to form a group with Pekao.
By the mid-1990s, it was clear that banks had to be bigger, that the concept of regional banks would not survive in the long term. Poland is too small a country for specialist banks. We were in a serious dialogue with Kanton. Both banks at the time had an international scope. Handlowy was present in Vienna, London, Luxembourg and Frankfurt. Pekao operated in Tel Aviv, Paris and New York. We were both in Luxembourg. This created the basis for a serious Polish bank, scalable, with a certain presence abroad.
What do you mean by scalable?
A bank that can play a fairly important role domestically and at the same time expand abroad. Handlowy and Pekao combined had around 20 percent market share, a little more in some segments. I tried to get the decision-makers at the time interested in this project. I still have the presentation, and I took it to the meeting with the supervisory board which interviewed me. But at the time, I wasn’t able to convince them.
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