Description
Grupo Financiero Banamex S.A. de C.V. has its origins and is the owner of the Banco Nacional de México or Citibanamex (formerly Banamex). It is the second-largest bank in Mexico. The Banamex Financial Group was purchased by Citigroup in August 2001 for $12.5 billion USD. It continues to operate as a Citigroup subsidiary.
History
Banamex was formed on 2 June 1884 from the merger of two banks, Banco Nacional Mexicano and Banco Mercantil Mexicano, which had operated since the beginning of 1882. The newly founded bank had branches in Mérida, Veracruz, Puebla, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí, and opened a branch in Guadalajara. After the start of World War I, the French managers of the bank left Mexico. After 10 years, Agustín Legorreta Ramírez who served as acting president managed to revive the bank. Following its reorganization, the bank collaborated with Banco de Mexico and US government officials. By 1937, 36 out of 50 bank branches in Mexico were owned by Banamex.
Banamex gradually introduced several financial product innovations to the Mexican market including the first credit cards in 1968 and an ATM banking system in 1972. In 1977, Grupo Banamex was formed by merging the bank with its investment and mortgage assets. Four years later, Banamex acquired the California Commerce Bank.
During a severe economic crisis in 1982, then Mexican president José López Portillo announced a major devaluation of the peso and nationalized all private banks in Mexico. For the next nine years, Banamex operated as a government-owned national credit association. In 1991, Banamex was reprivatized and it established Grupo Financiero Banamex–Accival with the investment bank Acciones y Valores de México (Accival). It had 720 branch offices, 31,797 employees, assets of $26.2 billion and a customer base of four million people making it the largest financial group in Latin America at the time.
As a result of the private credit aggressive expansion in Mexico, resulted in a strain of the bank's balance sheet (loan portfolio quality ratios and capitalization ratios). The December 1994 macro-devaluation of the Mexican pesos and the ensuing significant increase in domestic interest rates coupled with a dramatic economic recession, caused Banamex's and much of the rest of the privatized banks to essentially become insolvent.
In order to avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of generalized bank bankruptcies, the Ernesto Zedillo administration decided to rescue the troubled banks through a government fund (Instituto de Protección al Ahorro Bancario or IPAB, later called Fondo Bancario de Protección al Ahorro or Fobaproa). IPAB enticed the banks' shareholders to inject fresh equity into the banks by pledging to buy from the banks non-performing loans in a two to one (or in some cases greater) ratio with respect to the newly injected fresh capital in exchange for a long-dated government note with capitalized interest. Banamex eventually sold $_ worth of non-performing loans to IPAB, and its shareholders injected $_ of fresh equity. The combination of these measures coupled with a recovery of the Mexican economy helped clean up the bank's balance sheet.
From 1997 to 2001 Roberto Hernández Ramírez was the CEO. In 1997, Afore Banamex was created to access the newly created private pension fund market.
On 6 August 2001, Citigroup Inc. acquired Grupo Financiero Banamex-Accival for US$12.5 billion, which became Grupo Financiero Banamex. This was the largest-ever U.S.-Mexico corporate merger. Grupo Financiero Banamex's operations were integrated with Citibank's relatively small existing Mexico business under the Banamex brand name.
In October 2014, allegations were made that employees had taken millions of dollars in kickbacks from vendors. Authorities in Mexico and the United States are investigating the allegations. Citigroup encouraged Manuel Medina-Mora to resign.
