Germany’s Commerzbank has concluded the full acquisition of the comdirect bank Aktiengesellschaft (comdirect) business.
Comdirect was founded by Commerzbank back in 1994. Since then, Commerzbank has been the majority shareholder in the bank, with a 90.29% stake.
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Commerzbank’s 100% ownership of Comdirect formally ends the independence and stock-market listing of the latter.
Commerzbank has agreed to pay a cash compensation of €12.75 ($14.90) per share, in exchange for the shares of the remaining comdirect minority shareholders.
Initially, Commerzbank and comdirect will continue to operate their offerings as before, following the latest acquisition.
However, the banks plan to merge and expand their offerings later under a joint business model.
Commerzbank said that the new joint business model is “yet to be defined and negotiated with the employee representatives.”
Additionally, comdirect will remain domiciled in its previous locations Quickborn and Rostock.
As part of the acquisition, all the employees of comdirect that existed when the merger took place, have moved to Commerzbank.
Commerzbank in 2020
In August 2020, Commerzbank decided to permanently close 200 branches.
In its second quarter, the lender wrote off a $207m loan related to the scandal-plagued Wirecard.
In June, Commerzbank’s shareholder Cerberus urged the lender to slash over 7,000 jobs to reduce costs.
Commerzbank paid $47.5m fine for AML failures over a period of five years.
In May, Commerzbank hosted an issuance programme to raise nearly €3bn of capital and ditched its plan to divest stake in Polish banking arm mBank.
