Under group chief executive Andrea Orcel, UniCredit has reaffirmed its commitment to central and eastern Europe – highlighted by its announcement of the €300 million purchase of Alpha Bank Romania, part of a deal that also involved it taking a stake in the Athens-based group.
Today, despite exits after 2008 from markets such as Kazakhstan and Ukraine, as well as later sales in Poland and Turkey initiated under former chief executive Jean Pierre Mustier, UniCredit still has a top-five market share in nine of the region’s markets.
If it goes ahead as planned, the Alpha deal will propel UniCredit from Romania’s fourth to third-biggest bank, with a balance sheet of about €13 billion.
Speaking on a banking panel moderated by Euromoney earlier this year, UniCredit’s head of central and eastern Europe Teodora Petkova said that the bank’s “plan is to continue to grow at an accelerated pace” in the region.
Such confidence in the region clearly helps generate a sense of commitment among wealth management customers in CEE and UniCredit says its wealth management revenues, number of clients and assets under management have all been on the rise in the region.
UniCredit’s confidence in the region clearly helps generate a sense of commitment among wealth management customers in CEE
Wealth management is a vital part of UniCredit’s regional growth, not least because Orcel knows that the bank’s ability to reap synergies internationally rests on its deployment of common product expertise across its various national markets. One facet of that is the group-wide launch of its new onemarkets platform, distributing products developed inhouse and through strategic partnerships with international asset managers including Amundi, Allianz, BlackRock, Fidelity, JPMorgan, Pictet and Pimco.
The bank has also been making a renewed effort in sustainable investments and inter-generational wealth preservation; in some central and eastern Europe countries it has now been servicing clients for up to three generations. And it has ploughed ahead in digital investments, with a new robo-advisory application in Hungary called Private Invest, for example.
