Pekao lender plans to publish new strategy in early April

"We are assuming a return at the beginning of April with strategy data; this is also a certain function of the dialogue with PZU," Stypulkowski said.

He reported that the bank would take an opportunistic approach to possible acquisitions.

At the beginning of December, listed insurance group PZU, a shareholder in Pekao, published its strategy for 2025-27, which includes simplifying the group's structure and consolidating banking assets. The insurer reported that it planned to sell its Alior shares to Pekao to generate value for the PZU group and the other shareholders of both banks.

In January, the company's acting CEO Andrzej Klesyk announced that PZU's strategy would not be changed, but that it needed to be clarified in several aspects, he said, including greater clarity regarding the future of the banks in the group.

"We have to wait until PZU's new board structure comes back with some reflection on the strategy. We will wait for that," Stypulkowski said.

"We've had this dialogue; it stopped because there were changes in the PZU board. We will probably come back to this when the management structure at PZU is in place, I am in dialogue with Andrzej Klesyk (...) The new management of PZU has to form a view on this issue," he added.

The CEO, in a letter to shareholders included in the bank's 2024 annual report, stated that he sees further growth potential for Pekao in the areas of consumer loans and advances, savings products, the microenterprise segment, private banking and corporate banking, as well as in bancassurance.

He reported that the bank is working on better capital utilisation and is currently focusing on increasing customer activity, and that the technology debt that has built up over the last 20 years needs to be "urgently addressed".

The bank said on Thursday that it had met its targets in the 2021-2024 strategy. At the end of 2024, Pekao had 3.4 million active mobile banking customers, above the 3.2 million assumed in the strategy.

The cost/income ratio was 34.2 percent, which was better than the 42 percent stipulated in the strategic plan. ROE was 21.2 percent against the 10 percent planned in the last year of the strategy (assuming a NBP reference rate of 0.1 percent).

The bank's deputy CEO Dagmara Wojnar said that around 30 percent of the bank's mortgage portfolio is based on a periodic fixed rate, and in current sales the share is above 80 percent.

seb/ ao/ nl/