Individual and corporate customers place bank services above nationalism
While politicians argue that the state needs to protect the banking sector against foreign domination, Polish customers tend to disregard a bank's nationality and instead choose the one with the best services.
This "by their fruits you shall know them" approach seems to operate not only among individual and corporate customers, but also applies to various public institutions. Gospodarstwo Pomocnicze Kancelarii Premiera, the economic division of the prime minister's office, is a customer of ABN Amro, a foreign, Netherlands-based bank with an office in Poland. Zachodniopomorska Patients Fund, for instance, signed contracts with several different banks, including Kredyt Bank, BRE Bank, BNP Dresdner Bank Polska, Citibank (Poland) and ING Barings. The Polish Foreign Investment Agency (PAIZ) has an account in Bank Handlowy, whose strategic investor is now Citigroup.
"It's doesn't matter whether we call it a Polish or foreign bank," said Grzegorz Wichrowski, PR specialist at PAIZ. "As a treasury agency, we are obliged to maximize savings, so we choose a bank that offers the best services at the lowest price."
Janusz Ostaszewski, spokesman for Powszechna Kasa Oszczednosci Bank Polski (PKO BP), one of the few wholly Polish-owned banks, was not surprised to hear that the prime minister's office had chosen a foreign bank.
"Patriotism is more evident among less dynamic, poorer, individual clients, to whom it might matter that PKO BP is a Polish bank," he said. "I can't see anything wrong in the prime minister's office choosing ABN Amro as long as it (the bank) can get them (the office) better quality service."
According to Ostaszewski, PKO BP focuses mainly on retail banking with almost 4 million open accounts, but also has 350,000 accounts for small and medium companies. "Big business rarely chooses us, (and our) history is one of the reasons, " he said. "There are a lot of good products in Poland, but there are also things that we still have to learn, and banking is one of them."
The banking sector has been undergoing a transition since 1989. Under communism, Poland had one retail bank, PKO BP, two banks focusing on foreign trade Bank Handlowy and Bank Pekao and the National Bank of Poland (NBP), which provided financing for the centrally planned economy. Soon after the collapse of communism, NBP was split into nine separate commercial entities, which have been gradually privatized over the last 10 years.
Today, there are more than 82 banks in Poland but only three totally Polish entities: PKO BP, Bank Gospodarki Zywnosciowej (BGZ) and Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK). Most large banks have foreign strategic investors. UniCredito Italiano, for instance, owns almost 50% of Pekao.
"When one speaks about competition between Polish and foreign banking, one can only think about BGZ, PKO BP and BGK," said Aleksander Lubowski, ABN Amro's spokesman.
Lubowski said that ABN Amro has not been discriminated against by public institutional clients because of any Polish banking protection strategy. "The market economy rules," he said. "Apart from the economic division of the prime minister's office, we have several other institutional clients." But he declined to name them.
Lubowski said the variety of banking offers on the Polish market can only be regarded as an asset because more and more public institutions don't limit themselves to one bank. "It is starting to work the same way as it does anywhere in the world an institution doesn't stick to one bank," he said. "And that's why the competition among banks is getting tighter."
According to Slawomir Kot, head of the financial liquidity department at Mazowiecka Patients Fund, there is no longer a big difference between originally Polish and foreign banks. "Services are tailored to specific customers and all the banks do their best to attract clients," he said. Mazowiecka Patients Fund, which transfers up to tens of millions of zloty every day, has contracts with 17 banks, including PKO BP and Amerbank. "But other banks constantly try to lure us with their offers, and you can see that they are all trying hard, no matter where they come from," he said. "Eventually, we choose banks that let their customers stipulate the conditions of a transaction."
