There is an increasingly fierce war being waged for Polish banking customers – small and medium-sized banks are battling for the booming mortgage market while banks ranging from Greece’s Polbank EFG to US-based Citi are planning rapid expansion – but the country’s largest bank has been without a general for 10 months.
PKO BP, which has about 20% of the banking market, has been leaderless for political reasons – it is 51.5% owned by the state, and the government wants the new chief executives to be a politically safe pair of hands.