Alpha: Better late than never
UniCredit’s proposal to buy a stake in the local lender has come 23 years after the first effort
In mid-2000, Greece had just become the 12th member of the Economic and Monetary Union. For a long time, several European bankers were counting the opportunities and capital gains that could be hidden in the Greek banking system.
One of them was the then 43-year-old Alessandro Profumo, who two years earlier had become the managing director of the Italian UniCredit. With the main goal of enlarging the Italian group, Profumo approached Yannis Kostopoulos with a proposal to buy Alpha Bank.
The Greek banker was 20 years older and already had 27 years of experience as the manager of a credit institution. The chemistry between them was not particularly good, those familiar with the talks say, but the reason the deal did not go ahead at the time was that Kostopoulos saw no reason for UniCredit to reap the Greek bank’s growth prospects in the new euro environment, both in Greece and neighboring countries.
Profumo then tried his luck with rival Greek lender Eurobank, but again to no avail. For someone who acquired HypoVereinsbank, Bank Austria-Creditanstalt and Capitalia in less than five years, his Greek campaign was a failure.
Twenty-three years have passed since then and UniCredit, despite the fact that Profumo is now a distant memory for the Italian group, is making another attempt to enter the Greek banking system, at a time when the latter wants it more than ever. Essentially, it marks the first investment by a strategic partner in the local banking industry after 17 years.
According to the current chief executive officer of the Alpha Bank group, Vassilis Psaltis, it makes Alpha “the only bank in Greece with the participation of a strategic primary investor in its capital.”
The Alpha-UniCredit deal is based on an expanded commercial cooperation in portfolio product management and the pension and savings products industry through the Italians’ acquisition of 51% of Alpha Life, as well as the acquisition of 90.1% of Alpha Bank Romania and the merger of their activities in Romania’s market.
