UniCredit Bank Austria AG, branded and widely referred to as Bank Austria, is an Austrian bank, 99,9965% owned by Milan-based pan-European banking group UniCredit. Bank Austria was formed in 1991 by merger of Länderbank and Vienna's Zentralsparkasse, acquired Creditanstalt-Bankverein in 1997, and merged with it to form Bank Austria-Creditanstalt (BA-CA) in 2002. Its name reverted to Bank Austria in 2008, as UniCredit, the bank's owner since 2005, phased out the history-laden Creditanstalt brand.
History
Bank Austria was formed in 1991 by the merger of the troubled Länderbank and Vienna's Zentralsparkasse, in practice a takeover of the former by the latter led by its general director René Alfons Haiden; the merged entity became Austria's largest bank. In 1996, the Austrian government announced the privatization of Creditanstalt-Bankverein, in which it held a majority stake. In January 1997, Bank Austria acquired the stake for about 1.25 billion euros. In turn, Bank Austria sold a majority stake it held in GiroCredit for 8.24 billion schillings (about 600 million euros) to Erste Bank. In February 1998, the state sold its last shares and the remaining shares on the market were exchanged with shares in Bank Austria, and Creditanstalt was delisted from the Vienna Stock Exchange.
In stages from 2000 to 2002, HVB Group took over Bank Austria.