Retail bank chiefs dismissed after disappointing sales

The presidents of Poland's two pioneering retail banks, Millenium Bank and Handlobank, have both been dismissed due to disappointing results. Millenium is a subsidiary of BIG-Bank Gdanski, while Handlobank is the retail arm of Bank Handlowy. It appears that the foreign investors in these two institutions, Banco Commercial Portuguese (BCP) and Citibank, respectively, were not satisfied with the success of the retail networks compared with the cost of developing them. Handlobank, which was planning to open 100 outlets, encountered severe difficulties with its faltering IT system, which failed both at the outset of the venture as well as a second time when the number of clients had reached 100,000. To date the bank does not yet offer Internet banking. Millenium is a larger venture, with 250 branches planned at the cost of $140 million. BCP is fully supportive of the undertaking, however. An anonymous source claims that the real reason for Millenium President Lech Kurklinski's dismissal was not the bank's poor performance, but his disloyalty to BIG-Bank Gdanski management. Kurklinski had collaborated with Deutsche Bank when the latter attempted a hostile takeover of BIG-Bank Gdanski last winter. (Puls Biznesu, p. 5