Foreign Banks in Poland: Determinants of Their Presence Stability in the Post-Crisis Period

Abstract

The global financial crisis, followed by the Eurozone crisis, resulted in the changes in strategies of foreign banks active in Polish banking sector, which decided to reorganise the network of their branches and subsidiaries established in Central and East European countries. The aim of this paper was to identify the determinants of exit decisions taken by foreign banks operating in Poland, focusing on bank-level characteristics of their Polish subsidiaries. The research hypothesis states that the exit decisions were influenced not only by the financial distress of foreign banks, but also by the success of business model implemented in host country in pre-crisis period, and banks which obtained sustainable loan growth, financed from balanced and safe local sources, maintained their presence. In order to verify the hypothesis, the banks operating in Poland were divided into three groups, depending on the stability of their mother bank engagement, for which the comparative analysis and logit models were employed. The results confirmed that early exit decisions, motivated by the capital needs of foreign banks, affected subsidiaries with high but unstable profitability and unbalanced financing model before the crisis. In the second stage, the probability of the ownership changes was increased mainly by underperformance, especially lower net interest margin.