Hungary's Granit Bank will offer cross-border digital banking services in Romania from Q3 2024, marking its foreign market entrance, the lender said on July 24. Granit Bank will provide clients with RON and FX accounts through an application in Romanian, Hungarian and English. Granit Bank has been registered to provide the services by the central banks of both Hungary and Romania.

The launch of the services marks the start of Granit Bank's expansion abroad. Granit Bank has 200,000 account holders in Hungary.

Granit Bank CEO Eva Hegedus said that dynamic growth in recent years has provided a stable foundation to expand internationally with innovative and flexible services.

The bank was established in 2010 by the late construction industry magnate Sandor Demjan to help local SMEs recover from the global financial and economic crisis. The lender, the first in Hungary to adopt digital banking, s has grown from its small niche bank a decade ago to become the strongest player in the domestic mid-sized banking field serving 83,000 clients, 86% of whom are retail clients.

Granit Bank is the eighth-biggest universal bank in Hungary with total assets of HUF1.4 trillion (€3.56bn), a two-fold increase in two years with around 200,000 account holders.

The bank boasts the lowest NPL ratio in the sector, at just 0.02%, a fraction of the 2.9% average. Cost-to-assets ratio was 1.1%, half of the banking sector average.

Granit Bank closed 2023 with a consolidated after-tax profit of HUF21.6bn.

BDPST, the company owned by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s son-in-law Istvan Tiborcz, acquired the majority stake in the lender in 2022.