Mercantile Bank names top suitors
Solid institution up for sale only because Portuguese parent bank Caixa has been told to limit its overseas investments
It isn’t often that a bank comes on the market, especially one that seems to be in good shape. Usually, they become available in a financial crisis. Mercantile Bank is in no such trouble. It has provided R9.7bn in loans and has R9.3bn in deposits. The recently launched virtual banks, even Discovery Bank, might have to wait years to build up to Mercantile’s scale. MD Karl Kumbier says 30% of the business comes from the Portuguese community, which supported the Bank of Lisbon before it merged with the original Mercantile in 1995. Mercantile was delisted and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Portuguese bank Caixa in 2012. But Kumbier says that as a condition of a loan from the European Central Bank Caixa was forced to reduce its international assets. "The bank will keep its full service banks in Mozambique and Angola, but concluded that as a specialist bank outside the Portuguese-speaking world we were not core," says Kumbier. Of the 18 bidders that Caixa adviser Deutsche Bank consid...
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