World's best bank transformation 2017: KBC

If you were planning to write a case study on how a bank that was once close to collapse was able, relatively quickly, to turn itself into one of the developed world’s best performers, then you would struggle to find a better subject than KBC.

Remember that KBC was also a poster-child for what went wrong with the global banking system before the financial crisis of 2008. 

Here was a bank that had forgotten its strong roots in northern and eastern Europe and embarked on a strategy to become a global bank. One that had a host of assets in Asia, including in curious areas such as Japanese equities and a Chinese mutual fund; sprawling assets from Latvia to Romania; and most ruinously of all, a US structured products business that eventually wiped billions from the bank’s bottom line.