Awards for Excellence 2017
Also shortlisted |
KEB Hana Bank |
Lloyds Banking Group |
UniCredit |
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.