When Zdenek Turek left the central bank of Czechoslovakia in 1991 to join Citi’s newly opened Prague office, the local banking market was almost non-existent.
“There was no customer service to speak of, and know how was very low when it came to banking products,” he says. “Culture, risk management – everything had yet to be built.”
Of course, early pioneers such as Citi did not have the Czech market to themselves for long.