The National Bank of Greece (NBG; ) is a global banking and financial services company with its headquarters in Athens, Greece. It is the largest Greek bank by total assets.
85% of the company's pretax preprovision profits are derived from its operations in Greece, complemented by 15% from Southeastern Europe. The group offers financial products and services for corporate and institutional clients along with private and business customers. Services include banking services, brokerage, insurance, asset management, shipping finance, leasing and factoring markets. The group is the largest Greek bank by total assets and the third largest by market capitalisation of €1.06 billion as at 4 December 2018. It is the second largest by deposits in Greece after Piraeus Bank. It is fourth largest by Greek loan assets trailing Piraeus Bank, Alpha Bank and Eurobank Ergasias.
The bankers Jean-Gabriel Eynard and Georgios Stavros founded NBG in 1841 as a commercial bank. Stavros was also elected as the first director of the Bank until his death in 1869. From NBG's inception until the establishment of the Bank of Greece in 1928, NBG enjoyed the right to issue banknotes. When the Athens Stock Exchange was founded in 1880, NBG immediately listed on the exchange, a listing it has retained to the present.
The bank is currently listed on the Athens Exchange (, ISIN GRS003003019); it is a constituent of the FTSE/Athex Large Cap index. From 1999 to 2015 it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:NBG, ADR, ISIN US6336437057).
History
NBG was founded in 1841 in Athens, by the decree "On the establishment of (a) National Bank" (Official Gazette, no. 6 March 30, 1841, p. 59), according to which the National Bank is a private limited company based in Athens with a capital of 5,000,000 drachmas, divided into 5,000 shares of 1,000 drachmas. It was the first bank in the Modern Greek state's history.
At its founding the major shareholder of the National Bank was the Greek state with 1,000 shares out of 3,402. Other major shareholders were Nicholas Zosimas with 500 shares, Jean-Gabriel Eynard with 300 shares, King Louis of Bavaria with 200 shares, Konstantinos Vranis with 150 shares, Adolf Graf with 146 shares and Theodoros Rallis with 100 shares. Rothshild Frères Paris bought 50 shares and Jean-Gabriel Eynard bought another 50 shares in their name to boost the prestige of the new bank. It used to have the sole right of note issue, which it lost in 1928 when the newly established Bank of Greece took over as the country's central bank. In 1880, NBG was listed in the Athenas Stock Exchange. In 1899, NBG acquired the Privileged Bank of Epirus and Thessaly (Pronomiouchos Trapeza Epirothessalias).
The arrival of the 20th Century saw NBG begin its international expansion. In 1904 NBG established Banque d'Orient, together with Nationalbank für Deutschland, which almost immediately withdrew from the venture. The Greeks kept the branches in Thessaloniki (Selanik), Smyrna (İzmir), which were part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, and Alexandria, Egypt. Three years later, NBG chose Cyprus as another location. NBG became government-owned during the First World War when NBG refused to finance new military equipment for the Greek government. The government then passed a law that permitted the government to appoint its own people to the Bank's board.
In 1919 NBG acquired the Bank of Crete (Trapeza Kritis). However, in 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne provided for a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, leading to the departure of the Greeks from Smyrna. As a result, Banque d'Orient closed its branch there. The influx of more than 1 million refugees to Greece during this period created several challenges; NBG played a pivotal role in their settlement with loans and related instruments.
The 1930s saw further international expansion. In 1930 NBG and Bank of Athens combined their activities in Egypt into a joint subsidiary, Banque Nationale de Grèce et d'Athènes. Two years later, NBG acquired Banque d'Orient (Trapeza Anatolis). Then in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, the NBG established a subsidiary in New York City, the Hellenic Bank Trust Company. In World War II, the NBG in Greece was managed by Deutsche Bank for the German Occupiers.