Hungary’s OTP Bank has announced on Friday that it is buying a bank in Slovenia. The new asset, however, is not the previously reported Abanka but Societe Generale’s local operation.
OTP has announced today that it signed an acquisition agreement on purchasing 99.73% shareholding of SKB Banka, the Slovenian subsidiary of Societe Generale Group and other local subsidiaries held by SKB Banka.
With a market share of nearly 9%, SKB Banka is the 4th largest bank on the Slovenian banking market and as a universal bank it has been active in the retail and corporate segment as well.
The financial closure of the transaction is expected in the coming months subject to obtaining all the necessary regulatory approvals.
It’s been in the air for a while that OTP wants to expand to Slovenia where it had no operation yet. Most reports were about OTP bidding for Abanka, the third-largest bank of the country, but taking over SKB was also mentioned as a possibility. Similarly to the Hungarian lender’s most recent purchases, SKB is also owned by SocGen.
OTP has been one of the most active financial institution on the European M&A market. After the 2008 crisis, it embarked an acquisition streak in 2014 and since then it has purchased banks not only on markets where it was already present but also in new countries. In the most recent transactions it bought the assets of Societe Generale, as the French bank is gradually withdrawing from the region, and its operations have been taken over one by one by OTP.
In a recently published interview, OTP Chairman-CEO Sándor Csányi said his bank would buy one more bank in Slovenia and then it would stop for while, adding that they plan to enter Kosovo and Macedonia from Albania, but have no intention of buying a bank in Bosnia.
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