WARSAW: Polish banking regulators are ready to consider purchase of Polish banks by an insurer, a key banking regulatory official said Wednesday when asked to comment on rising talk that the nation’s largest insurer PZU is lining up as a buyer. “The door is obviously not closed to an insurer,” the deputy chief of Poland’s regulatory office KNF, Wojciech Kwasniak, told PAP Polish news agency of pending banking sector deals.
“Insurers function on a regulated market, but it’s all an individual question of appraisal of quality and that will be key in judging these processes,” Kwasniak said. Comments follow media reports that Poland’s top insurer PZU is interested in the purchase of as many as three large-cap banks now on sale: Alior, Raiffeisen Bank Polska and GE-unit BPH in what would be a historic integration to create the nation’s fifth largest bank.
