By Tom Sims
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German lender Oldenburgische Landesbank (OLB), which for years has flirted with doing an initial public offering, views current market conditions to launch a listing as strong, CEO Stefan Barth said on Friday.
Over the years, OLB’s plans for a relatively rare IPO of a bank have been scuppered by market turmoil in the wake of the Ukraine war, an ensuing energy crisis, and the collapse of banks like Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank.
“The market hasn’t been this good for a long time,” Barth told journalists.
However, he said any decision on timing was up to shareholders, adding that a decision was needed relatively soon if the bank, which has assets of 34 billion euros ($35.57 billion), were to aim for a springtime window to execute an IPO.
The bank’s shareholders include Apollo Global Management, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas and Grovepoint Investment Management. They didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“You can imagine that with multiple shareholders there are always multiple opinions on the subject,” Barth said.
Only a handful of banks have gone public on Germany’s main exchange in Frankfurt over the last 25 years, data from the exchange operator Deutsche Boerse shows.
One of the last bank IPOs was the 2015 listing of the property lender Deutsche Pfandbriefbank.
OLB is seeking to expand beyond its home turf of northwest Germany and plans to open offices in Frankfurt and Duesseldorf, Barth said.
One of its latest posters in an advertising campaign reads: “150 years and never heard of us? Not bad for a bank.”
Last year, Germany’s regulator BaFin ordered OLB to fix unspecified organisational shortcomings and to hold additional funds, but it didn’t elaborate.
($1 = 0.9557 euros)
(Reporting by Tom Sims; editing by Matthias Williams, Rachel More and Susan Fenton)
